[kartikkumar]

Forgive my ignorance, but why does SnapChat maintain a local cache beyond the 10-sec limit in the first place? Why don't they delete the photo and overwrite the disk space so that the photo is pretty much unrecoverable? Is it simply that this is too cumbersome to implement? Are there any technical restrictions? I tried Googling the issue and just came across the wave of articles that covered the discovery of the fact that photos were locally recoverable, but I don't seem to have found anything that indicates what motivated this design choice in the first place. Would be great if someone can shed light on this.

PS: I'm not a SnapChat user, so I admit that I might also be overlooking some functionality of the app that necessitates the use of a local cache

[girvo]

I wonder if you'd even have block level access to storage to pull that off through mobile APIs?

[e12e]

Well, it runs on Android? And you can compile your own kernel, and install google apps (or even run it in an emulator, anyway)... so... game over (wrt access to whatever is written to disc (or ram...))...

[neohaven]

Unless there are COW mechanisms in place, simply pulling characters from /dev/{,u}random and scribbling over the original file should work well enough for the purpose of overwriting after the 10 second window.