Deleted AI Chats May Leave Clues Behind (news.research.gatech.edu)

Researchers at Georgia Tech have unveiled a groundbreaking tool named ORISA that can recover deleted conversations from AI assistants on Android devices. This tool highlights a significant gap in the perceived privacy of local AI assistants, which typically run on the device rather than relying on cloud services. The study reveals that deleting a conversation doesn’t fully erase the data it may have left behind in the phone's working memory. ORISA can retrieve these remnants and even reconstruct them into working AI sessions, raising serious implications for user privacy and digital security. In their experiments, the team demonstrated ORISA's effectiveness by creating a fictional AI assistant, "Project Note Keeper," which retained valuable information even after deletion. The tool recovered 26 facts from an initial session that the original assistant could not access due to memory limitations, suggesting that significant data can persist beyond user control. With this capability, ORISA could transform digital investigations, allowing forensic experts to establish the information exchanged with AI assistants. However, the recovery process becomes more difficult as the device's memory gets overwritten. This research, presented at the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, beckons a closer inspection of the privacy practices surrounding local AI technologies.