A bug on iPhone let people open WhatsApp's View Once photos and videos again and again. A fix is out, so updating the app matters.
WhatsApp's View Once feature promises that a photo or video disappears after the person you sent it to has looked at it. On iPhone, that promise did not hold. A bug let the recipient view the content as many times as they wanted. WhatsApp has since fixed it, but only if the app is up to date.
View Once is meant for moments when you want to share something without it sticking around. Cybersecurity researcher Ramshath described the bug in a blog post. It was extremely easy to use and needed no technical knowledge.
If someone had sent you a View Once image or video, you could go to Settings, then Storage and Data, then Manage Storage. From there you found the sender's chat and sorted the storage by Newest. The View Once content was still sitting there, ready to open.
The bug only hit iPhone users. That is still a very large group, which makes this a significant privacy slip for WhatsApp and its parent company, Meta. The people most exposed are those who sent private photos or videos using View Once, trusting they would vanish.
Ramshath says he reported the problem through Meta's bug bounty program, which pays researchers who find security flaws. Meta replied that it already knew about the issue and was working on a fix. The fix came fairly quickly, in WhatsApp version 25.2.3 on iOS.
This is not the first View Once problem. In September 2024, security researchers found that the supposedly gone content could still be reached by entering the exact web address of the media file, because it was stored insecurely on WhatsApp's servers. Another similar problem followed. WhatsApp has fixed both.
The alert box above lists the steps. The short version is to update WhatsApp on your iPhone and treat View Once as a convenience, not a guarantee.
Two bugs of this kind in two years suggest the feature can fail in ways users cannot see. Even when it works, the person who receives a photo can still capture it by other means. If an image would cause real harm in the wrong hands, the safest choice is not to send it at all.
Update WhatsApp on your iPhone to version 25.2.3 or newer, and do not rely on View Once to protect truly private photos.
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