Your Android phone may remember AI chats you thought you deleted

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.

The researchers demonstrated this using a fictional assistant called Project Note Keeper, built with the ChatterUI, an open-source Android app that lets users run AI models directly on their phones. They fed it 100 made-up facts about a project, then deleted the conversation.

By the time they deleted the conversation, the original assistant could only access 14 facts, having lost track of the rest as the conversation exceeded its memory limit. But ORISA recovered enough information to create a new, interactive session that recalled 26 facts when questioned.

How? Even after you delete a chat, pieces of the conversation may remain in your phone’s memory. Think of it as clearing a conversation from your screen without necessarily wiping away every trace underneath. ORISA finds those leftovers and uses them to rebuild the AI session.

The researchers tested ORISA across 10 Android apps, three AI models, and 60 configurations, recovering conversation information still lingering in memory.

This is especially relevant for those experimenting with tools like Google’s AI Edge Gallery, which lets you run AI models entirely on-device without an internet connection. While running AI locally means your conversations don’t need to travel to cloud servers, that doesn’t guarantee they’re permanently erased when you delete them.

Beyond raising privacy concerns, the technology could help forensic investigators determine what someone told an AI assistant and what guidance they received, even after deleting the chat history.