Hey, Maybe It’s Time to Delete Some Old Chat Histories

If you’re worried about potential expansion of government surveillance and access to your information, or just want to do some digital purging so you’re not saddled with old data, there’s plenty here Specific steps you can take Protect your digital privacy. Just as archaeologists study carefully preserved tombs and ancient garbage dumps to gain insights into historic communities, your long-forgotten digital footprints may be more revealing and sensitive than you realize. While you can’t control everything, especially the information stolen in a breach or collected by data brokers, you may have a digital attic full of old data that you can delete or download and save offline. First stop? Old message history.

Chat is a great place to start putting numbers together. Their immediacy makes it easy to forget that if you don’t turn on auto-delete for your chat (or the platform doesn’t offer it), all of them will arrive in 10 minutes, “wait”, what color is this dress? Years later, the message “Oops, I have COVID-19” is still ringing in my ears. If you send them to an end-to-end encrypted platform, e.g. signal or WhatsAppthey exist only on your device and the devices of other people you chat with. This means that for governments or bad actors to read them, they would need direct control of your device – a good level of protection, but not foolproof.

But crucially, the messages you send on regular web apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger, etc. most of its historyGoogle Chat/Hangouts/Gchat are located on a cloud server somewhere. While they may be stored in encrypted form to prevent theft, the platform itself holds the keys to decrypt the data and is able to comply with government requests, no matter how old the information is. Of course, all of these “are you up?” may not seem important now, but years of chats can paint a very detailed picture of your life, relationships, political beliefs, and past movements and activities.

“It’s a good habit to do a good digital cleanup every now and then, especially with social media and old chat messages,” said Kenn White, head of security and director of the Open Encryption Audit Project at database developer MongoDB. “The person you were five or ten years ago was probably very different from the person you are today, so it’s worth asking yourself, ‘Do I really need those inside jokes and sarcastic posts from seven years ago? Do I need to keep my old group chats? message and forward it to every new phone I get?

Some programs, such as Apple’s Messages, make it easy to automatically delete chats after a period of time. On iOS, go to settings > app > message Then scroll and click Keep message. Then choose whether to keep messages permanently, for a year, or for 30 days and then delete them automatically.

In the free version of Slack, data older than one year will be automatically deleted. The company will retain data on paid plans permanently unless the administrator settings Scroll to delete. This is useful if you have an active Slack with friends, but most people who use Slack at work don’t make decisions about management policy and have no control over deletions. Keep this in mind for any communication you do on your employer platform. You may be able to browse and delete messages or files one by one, but you may not have the authority to make policy decisions about automatic or mass deletion.