If you’re worried about possible expansion of government surveillance and access to your information, or simply want to do a digital purge so you don’t find yourself saddled with old data, there are many solutions. concrete steps you can take to protect your digital privacy. Just as archaeologists study carefully preserved tombs and ancient trash piles to gain insight into historic communities, your long-forgotten digital footprint might be more revealing and sensitive than you think. And while you can’t control everything, especially information stolen in breaches or collected by data brokers, you probably have a digital attic full of old data that you can delete or download and save offline. First stop? Old message histories.
Chats are a good place to start your digital decluttering. Their real-time nature makes it easy to forget that if auto-deletion isn’t enabled for a chat (or a platform doesn’t offer it), all those “be there in 10 minutes”, “wait “. , what color is this dress???” and the “Welp, I have Covid” messages continue to circulate years later. If you sent them over an end-to-end encrypted platform like Signal Or WhatsAppthey only exist on your device and the devices of the other person(s) you were chatting with. This means that for governments or bad actors to read them, they will need direct control of your device – a good level of protection, but not foolproof.
But above all, the messages you sent on classic web applications like Slack, Facebook Messenger for most of its historyand Google Chat/Hangouts/Gchat are on a cloud server somewhere. And while it’s likely stored in an encrypted form to protect against theft, the platform itself has the keys to decrypt your data and would be able to comply with government requests, regardless of age. information. Of course, all those “are you up?” » may not seem significant now, but years and years of chat histories can paint a very detailed picture of your life, associations, political beliefs, and past movements and activities.
“Doing a good digital cleanup every once in a while is a great habit, especially with social media and old chat posts,” says Kenn White, chief security officer at database developer MongoDB and director of Open Crypto Audit Project. “Who you were five or ten years ago is probably very different from who you are today, so it’s worth asking yourself: ‘Do I really need these jokes and sarcastic messages from seven years ?’ Should I keep old group chat messages and transfer them to each new phone I receive?
Some programs like Apple Messages make it easy to automatically delete your chat histories after a set period of time. On iOS, go to Settings > Applications > Messages then scroll and tap Keep messages. Then choose whether you want to keep messages forever, for a year, or for 30 days before automatic deletion.
On the free version of Slack, data older than a year is automatically deleted. The company keeps data forever on paid plans unless the administrator sets up gradual elimination. This is useful if you have an active Slack with your friends, but most people who use Slack at work don’t make decisions about administrative policies and can’t control deletion. Keep this in mind for any communication you make on an employer’s platforms. You may be able to browse and delete messages or files one by one, but you probably won’t have access to make policy decisions about automatic or batch deletion.
