Viber - Serious issue with privacy!!!!!

[mcivor88]

I love WP, I loved viber!

Viber on my device (620) is slow, crashes every other time you go to open it and sometimes when it does open, it doesn't display the texts (it says no messages to display)

These issues I could live with (kinda) as I know viber is an active company trying to make their app for all devices and updates do come if not slowly.

The big issue i now have it privacy!!!!! For the past few months i've had problems sending photos, it seems to be just iphones (i think, cannot be sure), The photo preview would load but the pic wouldn't when they clicked into it. Below is a screenshot from an iphone trying to open an image i've sent

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Sometime it worked, other times it didn't.

What has really really annoyed me is what happened yesterday. Again I attempted to send my friend a picture or screenshot, again like above it didn't load. He then realised when he went into his camera roll on his iphone there was a pic of my girlfriend!!! Same time stamp from viber. The pic in question was a personal pic (not dirty) that has NEVER been sent through viber to anyone. It was saved in my Saved Photos album! He sent it back to me as shown below. (Full name, profile pics and other parts of the screenshot have been blacked out, image of gf low res and online with permission)

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Questions for the viber team (this forum page will be sent to them)

1. Wth?
2. Seriously, how can a PRIVATE image make its way onto viber?
3. Why does some images not load on the other end?
4. Are images saved on viber servers?
5. Why does it crash so much? Often just as you are about to send a photo
6. Why is it so slow?

Things I don't want to hear from users and the viber team

1. Anything about my friends device. The conversation was a group one and the other guy also got the private pic (iphone 5 and iphone 4s involved)
2. Anything about my friend or gf
3. Silly reasons why the app crashes
4. Someone telling me to reinstall it and wait 24 hours
5. Someone telling me this is fake. I'm actually furious about this!
6. People asking why i've put the image up online if i'm so mad. It's an example of whats going on, its not dirty, it up with full permission, its the fact that it could have been any pic at all)

 

[doublesman3486]

Now that is a serious issue!!! Viber needs to address this right away.

 

[palandri]

What's the advantage of using Viber instead of using SMS and MMS? Does your carrier restrict the number of SMS or MMS?

 

[JMBasquiat]

SMS and MMS cost money, and not everyone has a contract with "unlimited everything".

 

[mcivor88]

What's the advantage of using Viber instead of using SMS and MMS? Does your carrier restrict the number of SMS or MMS?

I live out in the sticks. Zero reception so trying to send a normal text message can be a struggle.
Also, whatsapp, viber, kik, etc are much faster. Group conversations too

 

[Viber]

Hi ,
This is an official rep. of Viber here in WPCentral.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
We are unfamiliar with this issue (we have not encountered it in the past), and of course, we will look into to it immediately to see what could have caused this. We will try to see if indeed Viber was the cause of this issue.

Immediate answers to some of your questions:
- Viber images are NOT saved on our servers (nor are plain Viber text messages). We do not keep a copy of our users' messages on our servers as we respect our users' privacy.
- We are unsure about the problem with loading the photo on the other side (nor are we certain about the crash issue).
- Though we haven't investigated this issue thoroughly yet, it is safe to say that this is not a 'phenomenon', i.e it's not that ALL of the photos that fail to be sent via Viber will cause a random photo from your phone to appear at the destination contact (in other words - if indeed Viber caused this - and it has not been 100% confirmed yet - it seems like a one-time glitch).

In order to help us understand the problem to the fullest, we would appreciate if you could take a minute and report the specific details to our support team using this direct link: Your ticket details (when you submit the ticket, please make sure to add the URL of our conversation). With this information, our development team will hopefully be able to find the source of the problem, and ultimately resolve it.

* Also, please let us know if this problem reoccurs.

Thanks again,
the Viber Team.

 

[mcivor88]

Only issue fixed since that post was made is that Viber does not seem to crash AS MUCH on the Lumia 620.


I think i've narrowed it down to what pictures fail to send to iphone users.


It's the screenshots taken on a windows phone, in my experience, they will not open on iOS. The preview also appears blank on viber for windows desktop.

 

[mcivor88]

Been testing this a bit more.

To me it seems that viber gets confused and messes up when trying to send a picture from the screenshots folder.

Weird thing that it does open on android (to the best of my knowledge) and Viber for Windows Desktop. It will not open on ios

On Viber desktop, if you send a photo from the screenshots it will open but the preview does not appear.

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Above is a screenshot of me sending the same image twice. (Sent through my phone on lumia 620, these synced to my pc)

1st image is raw from the screenshot folder on my phone. It DOES open on viber desktop but no preview. The same image DOES NOT open on iphones

2nd is a work around i did, i emailed the screenshot to myself then saved it into my saved photos folder. Send it and it worked. Opens and previews on all devices.

It has to be something to do with the format of the screenshots because another thing i noticed when trying to figure out a work around was that Nokia's Creative Studio app DOES NOT support screenshot images.

Can viber fix this issue on their end? Can the image format be changed/modified via the app before sending it?

 

[HaibaneReki]

Yes, screenshots are *.png files as opposed to usual *.jpg photos (I think due to quality)

 

[Ivan Schmidt]

Hi,
I have viber application on my Iphone 5, I send photo to my friend and my friend recieve another photo that actually does not exist in my photo album. And when she opend that photo on her phone, the right photo was shown.
My question is, from where was that "wrong" photo appeared and when she opend it disappeard if that photo was not in my photo album and not selected??

 

[Bart Groefkens]

Is it possible to restore deleted conversations inc. images on an Android device?

 

[elleM925]

I had this problem too. My boyfriend sent me a picture of pancakes but the thumbnail showed a half naked female. What was the picture of and did you get any answers? He also claims he hadn't seen the photo before.

 

[sexy1022]

Hi we are having problem with viber.

Just awhile ago, i received a miss call from the number of my hubby at Bangladesh at 3:48am via viber. He also called me at 3:48 am via regular call. What was weird was. He doesnt have viber installed on his Samsung Grand Duos. He never used viber before.

We checked the viber account, it has the same number as my husband's but after less than an hour it says that the number is not currently a viber user. How can this be? We checked the phone of my husband and there is no viber installed. we checked the google play store and we still need to download the viber application. BTW, I am using an iphone 5. i have screenshots for this.

Please help us. My husband is afraid that this maybe a breach of security.

I hope you can reply soon!

 

[cmakatu]

my viber pc keep saying i should check my internet connection but internet here is perfect and never complain about in anyway...it doesnt recall my contacts from phone as well

 

[illidanx]

Actually, it's just a bug. Sometime when you try to send a photo through viber, it sends the adjacent photo instead. Pretty stupid.

 

[orgesaa]

how can I hide my viber profile picture from someone????
help me please...

 

[Yasir Sheriffdeen]

Hi Viber,
Viber sent out a photo from my library without my permission to first group in my conversation history. I am lucky that the group was my family members and the photo was just random shot. But I wonder how this application access my library and send a photo to a group without my permission. Please advise what should I do stop this behaviour?
Regards
Yasir

 

[Manickal]

Viber crashes on WIndows 7. I have installed Viber for windows on my PC, but Viber crashes right after I try to run that. The program comes up and shows that contacts for only few seconds, the program stops because of some problems. But there is no any log about the error code in windows.

 

[marimario]

Hello! I'm doing a research about Viber and I need some extra info about it. Something more than I can find on wikipedia. Can you help me please? thanks

 

[Blade800]

Havent heard from Viber support for awhile, I created topic few months back. When do you plan on releasing update?

The battery drain is really huge and annoying and the app really need rework (design wise and fuction wise) its slow.