Hey, maybe it’s time to delete some old chat history

If you’re concerned about potential expansions of government surveillance and access to your information, or simply want to do some digital cleansing so you’re not burdened with outdated data, here are a bunch of tips Concrete steps you can take To protect your digital privacy.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 historical societies, your long-forgotten digital footprint can be more sensitive and revealing than you realize. And while you can’t control everything — especially information stolen in hacks or collected by data brokers — you likely have a digital attic full of old data that you can delete or download and save offline. First stop? History of ancient letters.

Chats are a good place to start the process of decluttering digital clutter. Its real-time nature makes it easy to forget that if you don’t turn on auto-delete chat (or if the platform doesn’t offer it), it’s all “it’ll be there in 10 minutes” stuff, and “you wait”, What color is this dress?“Hi, I have Covid” messages are still coming back years later. If you send them on an end-to-end encrypted platform like signal or WhatsAppthey only exist on your device and the devices of the other person or other people you were chatting with. This means that in order for governments or bad actors to read it, they would need to have direct control of your device, which is a good level of protection, though not foolproof.

But just as important are the messages you sent via regular web apps like Slack and Facebook Messenger most of its historyand Google Chat/Hangouts/Gchat are on a cloud server somewhere. Although it will likely be stored in an encrypted form to protect against theft, the platform itself has the keys to decrypt your data and will be able to comply with government requests for it, regardless of the age of the information. Sure, all those words may not seem like much now, but years and years of chat histories can paint a very detailed picture of your life, your connections, your political beliefs, and your 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 Ken White, security director 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 helpful to ask yourself: ‘Do I really need those seven-year-old in-jokes and sarcastic posts?’” Do I need to keep those old group chat messages And transfer it to every new phone I get?'”

Some programs like Apple Messages make it easy to automatically delete chat histories after a set period of time. On iOS, go to Settings > Applications > Messages Then scroll and click Keep messages. Then choose whether you want to keep messages forever, for one year, or for 30 days before automatic deletion.

In the free version of Slack, data older than a year is automatically deleted. The company keeps data forever on paid plans, unless an administrator Prepare Rolling deletion. This is useful if you have an active Slack with your friends, but most people who use Slack for work don’t make decisions about administrative policies and can’t control deletion. Keep this in mind with any communication you make on your employer’s platforms. You may be able to browse messages or files and delete them one by one, but you likely won’t have access to make policy decisions about automatic deletion or bulk deletion.