If you’re worried about the possible expansion of government surveillance and access to your information, or just want to do some digital purging so you’re not stuck with old data, there are some concrete steps you can take to protect your digital privacy. . Just as archaeologists study preserved tombs and ancient trash heaps to learn about historic communities, long-forgotten digital footprints can be more vivid and sensitive than you realize. And while you can’t control everything—especially information stolen in a breach or collected by data brokers—you may have a digital attic full of old data that can be deleted or downloaded and stored offline. First stop? Old message history. Chats are a great place to start digital decluttering. The real-time nature makes it easy to forget that if you don’t turn on auto-delete for chat (or if the platform doesn’t offer it), it’s all “be in 10 minutes,” “wait. , what color is this shirt???” and the “welp, i have covid” message is still there years later. If you send it on an end-to-end encryption platform like Signal or WhatsApp, it’s only on the other person’s device or the person you’re talking to. That means the govt or bad actors can read it, they need direct control of your device – a good level of protection, even if it’s not easy, and Google Chat/Hangouts/Gchat is sitting on a cloud server somewhere. And while it may be stored in an encrypted form to protect against theft, platform that itself has the key to decrypting your data and will be able to comply with government requests, no matter how old the information is. Sure, the whole “u up?” may not seem important now, but years and years of chat history can illustrate it a detailed description of his life, associations, political beliefs, and past movements and activities. cleaning from time to time is a great habit, especially with social media and old chat messages, “said Kenn White, head of security 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 you have to ask yourself, ‘Do I really need my seven-year-old’s jokes and sarcastic posts? Some programs like Apple’s Messages make it easy to delete chat history automatically after a certain period of time. On iOS, go to Settings > Apps > Messages and scroll and tap Save Messages messages forever, one year, or 30 days before automatic deletion. In the free version of Slack, data older than one year will be deleted automatically. The company keeps the data forever in the paid plan, unless the administrator sets a rolling deletion. This is useful if you have active Slack with your colleagues, but most people who use Slack at work do not make administrative policy decisions and cannot control deletions. Keep this in mind for any communications you make on employer platforms. You may be able to open and delete individual messages or files, but you won’t have access to make policy decisions about automatic or batch deletion.
