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If you are worried about possible expansion of government surveillance and access to your information, or simply want to do a digital purge so that you are not saddled with old data, there are a lot of concrete steps you can take to protect your digital privacy. Just as archaeologists study carefully preserved tombs and ancient trash heaps to gain insight into historic communities, your long-forgotten fingerprint may be more revealing and sensitive than you think. And while you can’t control everything – especially information stolen in breaches or gathered by data brokers – you probably have a digital attic full of old data that you can delete or download and save offline. First stop? Stories of old messages.
Chats are a good place to start your digital decluttering. Its real-time nature makes it easy to forget that if you haven’t activated automatic deletion for a chat (or if a platform doesn’t offer it), all those “be in 10 minutes”, “wait”. , what color is this dress???” and “welp, I have covid” messages are still catching years later. If you sent them on an end-to-end encrypted platform like Signal o WhatsAppThey only exist on your device and the devices of the other person or people you talked to. This means that for governments or bad actors to read it, they would need direct control of your device – a good level of protection, but not foolproof.
Crucially, however, the messages you send on regular web applications such as Slack, Facebook Messenger for most of its historyand Google Chat / Hangouts / Gchat are sitting on a cloud server somewhere. And while they are probably stored in an encrypted form to protect against theft, the platform itself has the keys to decrypt your data and could fulfill the government’s requests for it, no matter how much the information is. Of course, all those “u up?” They may not seem significant now, but years and years of chat history can paint a very detailed picture of your life, associations, political beliefs and past movements and activities.
“Doing a good digital cleanup from time to time is a great habit, especially with social media and old chat messages,” says Kenn White, chief security officer at database developer MongoDB and director of the Open Crypto Audit Project. “Who you were five or 10 years ago is probably very different from who you are today, so it’s worth asking yourself: ‘Do I really need those seven-year-old jokes and sarcastic posts? Do I need to keep old group chat messages and transfer them to every new phone I get?
Some programs like Apple Messenger make it easy to automatically delete your chat histories after a period of time. On iOS, go to Settings > Apps > Messages and then scroll and tap Keep the messages. Then choose whether to keep the messages forever, for a year, or for 30 days before they are automatically deleted.
On the free version of Slack, data older than one year is automatically deleted. The company keeps the data forever on the paid plans, unless the administrator put in place rolling elimination. This is useful if you have an active Slack with your friends, but most people who use Slack at work do not make decisions about administrative policies and cannot control deletion. Keep this in mind for any communication you make on an employer’s platforms. You may be able to go through and delete messages or files one by one, but you probably don’t have the access to make policy decisions about automatic or batch deletion.
