Apple patches bug that exposed deleted Signal messages
Apple has addressed a security flaw that allowed deleted Signal messages to be retained on iPhones. The bug meant that notifications for disappearing messages were stored in an internal database, potentially exposing sensitive information. Signal's president criticized the issue, emphasizing the importance of true message deletion for user privacy.
- ▪Apple has patched a bug that caused deleted Signal messages to remain accessible on iPhones.
- ▪The flaw allowed the FBI to extract supposedly erased message content from a user's device.
- ▪Signal's disappearing messages feature was not fully effective due to iOS retaining notification content for up to a month.
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| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/04/28/apple-patches-bug-that-exposed-deleted-signal-messages.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:52:15 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T18:26:49.538Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T18:26:49.538Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | FleYjd2Ev9k5 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Apple patches bug that exposed deleted Signal messages Ellsworth Toohey 10:52 am Tue Apr 28, 2026 BigTunaOnline / Shutterstock.com Signal's disappearing messages weren't fully disappearing. When a message arrived on your iPhone, iOS stored the notification content in an internal database — and that database held onto the text for up to a month after you deleted the message inside Signal. The FBI ran forensic tools on someone's iPhone and extracted Signal message content that the app's auto-delete timer had supposedly erased. Apple has now patched the bug, according to TechCrunch.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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