- Tech researchers have developed a forensic tool that recovers deleted conversations from AI apps running locally on Android devices.
- In one experiment, the tool recovered 26 previously shared facts, compared with just 14 accessible to the original AI session.
- The technique requires forensic access to device data and doesn’t establish that conversations from cloud-based chatbots are similarly recoverable.
Recovering deleted information from phones is hardly a new trick. We’ve seen it with text messages, photos, and other supposedly erased data. But researchers have taken things somewhere more intriguing: they’ve developed a forensic tool that can retrieve deleted AI conversations and actually bring the chatbot back to life, complete with some of its previous knowledge.
According to researchers at Georgia Tech (via Digital Trends), the technique uses a forensic tool called ORISA to piece together information AI apps leave behind on Android phones. These local assistants process conversations on your device, offering more privacy by keeping your chats away from remote servers. However, deleting a conversation doesn’t necessarily clear everything from the phone’s working memory. ORISA searches for those leftover pieces and uses them to reconstruct previous conversations.