If you're concerned about the potential expansion of government surveillance and access to your information, or just want to do some digital cleansing so you're not saddled with old data, there are plenty of options available. 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 historical communities, your long-forgotten digital footprint may be more revealing and sensitive than you realize. And while you can't control everything — especially 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. Can save offline. first stop? Old message history.
Chats are a good place to start your digital decluttering. Their real-time nature makes it easy to forget that if you haven't turned on auto-delete for a chat (or if a platform doesn't offer it), they'll all be “I'll be there in 10 minutes,” “Wait.” , what color is this dress???” and “You're welcome, I've got Covid” messages are still knocking years later. If you sent them on an end-to-end encrypted platform Signal Or WhatsAppThey exist only on your device and the devices of the other person or people you were chatting with. This means that for governments or bad actors to read them, they would need to have direct control over your device – a good level of security, though not foolproof.
However, the important thing is that the messages you sent on regular web apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger most of its historyAnd Google Chat/Hangouts/Gchat are sitting on a cloud server somewhere. And while they are probably stored in encrypted form to protect against theft, the platform 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, they're all “You up?” 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 activity.
“It's a good habit to do a good digital cleanup 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 old group chat messages? Do I need to keep them and carry them over to every new phone I get?
Some programs, like Apple's Messages, make it easy to automatically delete your chat history after a set period of time. On iOS, go to settings , Apps , messages and then scroll down and tap leave a messageThen choose whether to keep the messages forever, for a year, or for 30 days before auto-deleting.
On the free version of Slack, data older than a year is automatically deleted. The company keeps data on paid plans forever, unless the administrator made Rolling deletion. This is useful if you have Slack active with your friends, but most people who use Slack at work don't make decisions about administrative policies and can't control deletions. Keep this in mind for any communications you make on an employer's platform. You may be able to view and delete messages or files one by one, but you probably won't have access to make policy decisions about automatic or batch deletion.