If you’re concerned about potential expansions of government surveillance and access to your information, or simply want to do a digital cleanup so you’re not saddled with old data, there are a number of concrete steps you can take to protect your digital privacy. . Just as archaeologists study carefully preserved tombs and ancient trash heaps to better understand historic communities, your long-forgotten fingerprint may be more revealing and sensitive than you think. And while you can’t control everything (particularly 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 organizing digital content. Its real-time nature makes it easy to forget that if you don’t have auto-delete turned on for a chat (or if a platform doesn’t offer it), all those “they’ll be there in 10 minutes” “just wait.” “What color is this dress???” and the “well, I have covid” messages are still going around years later. If you sent them through an end-to-end encrypted platform like Signal or WhatsApp, they only exist on your device and the devices of the other person or people you were chatting with. That means that for governments or bad actors to be able to read them, they would need direct control of your device, a good level of protection, although not foolproof.
Most importantly, though, the messages you sent in common web apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger for most of their history, and Google Chat/Hangouts/Gchat are sitting on some cloud server. And while it is likely stored in encrypted form to protect against theft, the platform itself has the keys to decrypt your data and could comply with government requests, regardless of the age of the information. Sure, all those “are you okay?” They 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 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 ten years ago is probably very different from who you are today, so it’s worth asking yourself: ‘Do I really need those inside jokes and snarky posts from seven-year-olds?’ Should I keep old group chat messages and transfer them to each new phone I get?’”
Some programs like Apple Messages make it easy to automatically delete your chat history after a set period of time. On iOS, go to Settings > Applications > Messages and then scroll and tap Keep messages. Then choose whether you want to keep the messages forever, for a year, or for 30 days before automatically deleting them.
In the free version of Slack, data older than one year is automatically deleted. The company retains data forever on paid plans, unless the administrator establishes continuous elimination. 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. Please 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 probably won’t have access to make policy decisions about automatic or batch deletion.