Deleted messages in iPhone shows up on Desktop Signal app going back many many days

[bberkok]

Bug description

Although I have been deleting my messages on my iPhone several times per day, I was surprised to find all those messages still come up when I started the Signal app on my desktop computer which is a MacBook. I am concerned that you are actually keeping old previous messages on your server and hence the app is not as secure and private as I had thought. What is going on here? Is this a bug or this is a so-called "feature"???

Platform info

iPhone 8 with the latest version of iOS
MacBook Pro with mac OS Sierra

[2-4601]

This is a duplicate of #643.

Each message is encrypted with a unique key. The server or anyone else on the Internet can't do anything without those keys. Only your devices can read the messages upon receiving. Thus the only security issue is if someone gets physical access to your desktop computer and sees a message you deleted on your iPhone. This case will be handled when syncing message deletion gets implemented (#643).

[GuardianMajor]

I may be wrong, since I am on Windows, but I believe the reason behind that is that the desktop clients maintain their own message database, so if you delete the original it won't propagate to the desktop client, unless you also "reset" the conversation on that client as well, which will remove the copy it maintains on its own. Again, I may be wrong but I believe the only exception to this is "disappearing messages" which do presumably get propagated to all clients when they disappear. So I would suggest if you want to clear on both sides manually, then you reset the same conversation on the desktop client as well when you do the device.

[gasi-signal]

As @2-4601 and @GuardianMajor this is currently indeed ‘by-design’ and tracked in #643.