If you’re concerned about government surveillance, deliberate access to your information, or just want to purge all those old messages, there are plenty of concrete steps to protect your digital privacy. Just as archaeologists study preserved tombs and ancient rubbish heaps to gain information about historical communities, your footprint on-line long-forgotten could 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 full cyber loft that you can delete, download, and save offline.
First stop: your message history
Chats are a good starting point. Its real-time nature makes it easy to forget that if you don’t have auto-delete enabled in a chat, or if a platform doesn’t offer it, all those messages of: “I’ll be here in 5 minutes,” “what dress should I wear?” ?” and “he won’t be able to go, I have covid”, continue to circulate years later. If you sent them through a social network or messaging service with end-to-end encryption like Signal or WhatApp, they only exist on your device and the devices of the people you were chatting with. This means that for malicious actors to read them, they would need direct control of your phone. A good level of protection, although not infallible.
However, Messages you send through regular web apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Google Chat are stored on some cloud server. Although these remain encrypted to protect the information from theft, the platform itself has the keys to decrypt your data and could respond to government requests, regardless of the age of the information. The intrusive “are you awake?” They may seem like insignificant messages now, but years and years of chat history can paint a very detailed picture of your past life, relationships, political beliefs, and activity.
Kenn White, chief security officer at database developer MongoDB and director of the Open Crypto Audit Project initiative, suggests that doing a good digital cleanup from time to time is a good habit, especially with social media and old messages. “Who you were five or ten years ago is very different from who you are today, so it’s worth asking yourself: ‘Do I really need the local jokes and sarcastic messages of 2015? Is it essential to keep messages from group chats and move them to each phone number you have?'”.
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Messages
Some apps like Apple Messages make it easy to automatically delete your chat histories after a set period of time. To do this, go to Configuration > Apps > Messages and then tap Keep messages. Choose whether you want to keep messages forever, for a year, or for 30 days before automatically deleting them.
Slack
In the free version of Slack, data older than one year is automatically deleted. On paid plans, data is retained forever unless your administrator configures rolling deletion. This is useful if you have an active Slack with your friends, but most people who use Slack at work don’t make administrative policy decisions and can’t control deletion. Keep this in mind for any communication you make on an employer’s platforms. You may be able to review and delete messages or files one by one, but you likely won’t have access to make decisions about automatic deletion policies.
Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram
Meta Messenger now offers auto-delete options, but for existing chats you have to scroll down the list on desktop or mobile app and delete them one by one. Meta’s other chat platforms, Instagram Chat and WhatsApp, are similar, except that since 2016, WhatsApp encrypts end-to-end instead of adding additional protection.
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x
X has undergone many changes since Elon Musk bought Twitter more than two years ago. Musk promised to add end-to-end encryption to text messages, and finally debuted an optional encryption feature for paying users, but it’s unknown if the tool offers full encryption or if it is open source for verification. If you want to reduce the data you save on the platform, you can delete individual messages or review your chat list and delete entire conversations.
Gmail
If you’ve had Gmail for a long time, chances are the messaging service Google Talk, formerly known colloquially as Gchat, holds a special place in your heart. In its time, Gchat was known for its interoperability with platforms like AIM, becoming a siled chat platform like Google Hangouts; It later became the current Google Chat. The messages you have sent on this platform continue to circulate, but they are not all in the same place.
Gchat was fully integrated into Gmail and was not a standalone platform, so all your chat histories were saved in your email archive. To find them: Open Gmail and search for the phrase “in:chats” (without the quotes). Hundreds or thousands of chats from May 2013 and earlier will appear; You have to delete them directly from Gmail. After May 2013, Google migrated users from Gchat to Hangouts, and that history migrated to Google Chat, so you can delete entire chats or individual messages there.
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