If you’re using Snapchat with a person who uses an Android device to view your snaps, your snaps may still be hidden. We are talking about not eliminated, not disappeared, not disappeared forever. Unless that person regularly logs out of their Snapchat account (log out, not just log out of your app), chances are those Snaps (photos, videos) are still sitting there, tucked away in a folder called “chat_snap.” According to the creators of a tool called “SnapRecovery,” “deleted Snaps can also be recovered using proper forensic tools.”
Before going too far, note that the creators of the SnapRecovery tool last tested with Snapchat v11.9.0.48 Beta. They used LineageOS (modified Android 10) on a rooted Android device. It should be clear, here, that the path to recover Viewed/Deleted Snaps is not particularly easy. If a person reading this has never rooted an Android device before, they will most likely have a hard time getting from point A, reading this, to point B, preparing their Android device, rooting, running the SnapRecovery tool, to point C, recovering Snaps with said tool.
The creators of this tool are listed in the sitio GitHub like Kian Kasad, Siddharth Dushantha and mirsella. These creators and researchers have discovered that the Android version of Snapchat does not delete Snap files until the user logs out of their account in the app.
for him Snap page «Stored Snaps» last updated on May 9, 2013, “after opening a Snap, the temporary copy is deleted from device storage.” As is often the case with all “deleted” files on any device, such files are not completely “deleted” after the first time the user commands them to be deleted. With the right set of tools, like the SnapRecovery tool on GitHub, the average everyday user can recover Snaps after viewing them.
SEE ALSO: Snapchat is not private, nor is it safe
To prevent Snaps from being viewed after you’ve viewed them once, or even deleted, start by signing out of Snapchat. You might want to get into the habit of doing this from time to time so that you can at least start moving Snaps from the “Chat_Snap” Android folder to a slightly safer deleted state.
After that, it really depends on how important it is that your previously viewed or deleted Snaps remain invisible forever after that. If you have a device that opened a Snap that absolutely CANNOT be seen by anyone again, the best way to make this happen is to destroy the phone.
There is still a chance that the media in Snap still exists somewhere on the internet, and probably on the device where it was first captured. But we know the risks of capturing media we don’t want to share, right?