Penny Mordaunt, a minister in the government, is the most recent witness in the Covid investigation to report missing WhatsApp messages.
Two years of WhatsApp conversations between the House of Commons leader and Boris Johnson have vanished, the leader said.
Prior to this, Mr. Johnson informed the inquiry that he had misplaced roughly 5,000 messages.
He has “sent all relevant messages in his possession to the inquiry and has complied exactly with their requests,” according to his spokeswoman, who talked with the BBC.
Former Stormont ministers and prime minister Rishi Sunak, who was chancellor of the exchequer at the time, are among the politicians who have lost WhatsApp conversations they sent during the outbreak.
In her witness statement, Ms. Mordaunt—who was paymaster general at the time—stated, “I could find no WhatsApp messages between me and the PM between 20 March 2018 and 22 March 2020.”
Regarding the missing messages, she requested a meeting with Boris Johnson’s chief of staff fourteen times, “but had no response from his team.”
She was later informed that her phone belonged to her and not the government, and that she would need to pay tens of thousands of pounds to have it forensically examined.
She added that she had since discovered that a similar problem has occurred with WhatsApp messages exchanged with Michael Gove, who was chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster at the time.
Can WhatsApp communications just disappear then?
Chats are stored independently on each person’s device.
She was later informed that her phone belonged to her and not the government, and that she would need to pay tens of thousands of pounds to have it forensically analyzed.
She continued by saying that she has since learned of a comparable issue involving WhatsApp conversations sent and received with Michael Gove, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster at the time.
Can WhatsApp communications just disappear then?
Conversations are kept apart on every individual’s device.
Therefore, if Person A and Person B are messaging each other, a complete, independent record of their discussion will exist on both of their phones.
Messages can only be removed for everyone for 48 hours after they are sent; when this happens, a notification notifies all participants.
However, only the user on their own phone has the ability to remove messages older than that.
Person B will therefore continue to have a message that Person A deletes if it is older than two days.
Only someone who physically picks up Person B’s phone and logs into their WhatsApp account will be able to remove it from it.
Moreover, a function known as “vanishing messages” is available.
However, messages written before to this feature being activated would remain in effect because it was only introduced in the UK in November 2020.
Boris Johnson reported having his phone factory reset. Even if he lost it, this would not have an impact on the transcript of his talk with Penny Mordaunt that was kept on her phone.
He added that his phone number had changed. Once more, the data on Ms. Mordaunt’s phone would remain unaffected regardless of whether he created a new WhatsApp account or transferred his existing one to the new number.
Lastly, he brought up the outage of the WhatsApp server at the moment. Sending messages could be hindered by a WhatsApp headquarters outage, but the messages that have already been sent would remain unaltered.
On WhatsApp servers, messages are never kept.
If they are backed up, depending on whether the phone is an Android or an iPhone, they will be kept on servers run by Google or Apple.
Additionally, they are sent with end-to-end encryption, which limits reading to the devices of the sender and recipient.
They wouldn’t be able to be altered, not even if WhatsApp or another party had access to them.