Hey, Maybe It’s Time to Delete Some Old Chat Histories

If you’re worried about the potential expansion of government surveillance and access to your information, or just want to do some digital cleansing so you’re not messing around with old data, here are a few 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 digital footprints can be more revealing and sensitive than you realize. And while you can’t control everything—especially information stolen through breaches or collected by data brokers—you probably have a digital attic full of old data that you can delete or download and store offline. First stop? Old message history.

Chat is a good place to start your digital decluttering. Their real-time nature makes it easy to forget that if you don’t turn on auto-delete for a chat (or if a platform doesn’t offer it), they’ll be “be there in 10 minutes,” “wait, What color is this dress????” And the “Welp, I have covid” messages are still knocking almost years later. If you send them over an end-to-end encrypted platform signal or WhatsAppThey only exist on your device and the devices of the other person or people you’re chatting with This means that for governments or bad actors to read them, they’ll need direct control of your device – a good level of protection, though not foolproof.

Importantly, though, the messages you send in regular web apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger Most of its historyAnd Google Chat/Hangouts/Gchat is sitting on a cloud server somewhere. And while they’re stored in an encrypted form to potentially protect against theft, the platform itself has the keys to decrypt your data and will be able to comply with government requests for it, no matter how old the information is. Of course, all those “you up?”s may not seem significant now, but years of chat history can paint a very detailed picture of your life, associations, political beliefs, and past movements and activities.

“It’s a good habit to do a good digital cleaning from time to time, especially with social media and old chat messages,” says Ken White, security principal 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 Have to take them to every new phone I get?’”

Some programs, like Apple’s Messages, make it easy to automatically delete your chat history after a certain period of time. On iOS, go to settings > Apps > the message and then scroll and tap keep message. Then choose whether to keep messages forever, for one year, or automatically delete them for 30 days

In the free version of Slack, data older than one year is automatically deleted. Company keeps data on paid plans unless administrator set up Remove rolling. This is useful if you have an active Slack with your friends, but most people who use Slack at work don’t decide on administrative policies and can’t control deletion. Keep this in mind for any communications you make on employer platforms. You may be able to delete and delete individual messages or files, but you likely won’t have access to make policy decisions about automatic or batch deletion.