Real-Time chat apps
Snapchat and Facebook's poke reportedly deletes the contents of the videos and
photos within a few seconds after it has been sent. But that is not the whole
truth. The videos and pictures can be certainly accessed again using a file
browser. Buzzfeed discovered this week that the video files sent through the
snapchat which is supposed to disappear within a few seconds are stored in
temporary folder. Snapchat was a popular app which got known for its feature to
delete the sensitive messages within a short span. On Thursday, the site
Buzzfeed reported that both the sites Snapchat and poke spared copies of shared
videos are accessible through a free iPhone file browser. This can be done when
the shared video is not opened by the recipient. To view the content one has to
plug into a PC and open a file browser. A staff reporter at Buzzfeed, Katie
Notopoulos found that both the chat apps kept copies of videos that should be
deleted. Also, she found that the shared video files are available in a folder
called "tmp" by Snapchat and "mediacard" on Facebook's
Poke.
These files can be easily preserved by copying it into a hard drive. Snapchat
is also available in Google Android phones but it is still not known whether
the files are preserved in the same way on smartphones too. Snapchat did fix a
solution for a bug, this December, which put permanent versions of unwatched
videos into the smartphones' video gallery. Technology can always be reverse
engineered but it definitely spoils the fun. Facebook is yet to comment on the
issue.
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