Android AI privacy concerns as researchers recover deleted chat data

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a tool called ORISA that can recover traces of deleted AI conversations from the working memory of Android devices. The study demonstrates that while local AI assistants offer privacy advantages by processing data on-device, information used during a session may remain in the phone's memory even after a user deletes the visible chat.

In experimental tests using the ChatterUI Android app, researchers provided an AI with 100 invented facts and then deleted the conversation. Using ORISA, they were able to reconstruct a working session that successfully produced 26 of the original facts, outperforming the original active session which could only access 14 facts at that stage.

While the tool can rebuild sessions using remnants found in working memory, the ability to retrieve data decreases as the device continues to operate and new activity overwrites the memory fragments.