If you're worried about the potential expansion of government surveillance and access to your information, or just want to do some digital detox so you're not burdened with old data, there are plenty of options available. way Specific 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 digital footprint may be exposed and more sensitive than you think. And while you can't control everything—especially the information stolen in a breach or collected by data brokers—you probably have a digital attic full of old data that you have can be deleted or downloaded and saved 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 enable auto-delete for the chat (or if the platform doesn't offer it), all of that “will be there in 10 minutes”, “wait, What color is this dress????” and the “hi, I have Covid” messages are still appearing 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 other people or people you're chatting with. That means for governments or bad actors to read them, they would need to take direct control of your device—a good level of protection, though not perfect.
However, what matters are the messages you send on regular web apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger for most of its historyand Google Chat/Hangouts/Gchat is sitting on a cloud server somewhere. And while they may be stored in encrypted form to prevent theft, the platform itself has the keys to decrypt your data and can comply with government requests for that data, regardless Tell me how old that information is. Sure, all those “you up?” It may not seem important now, but the history of conversations over the years can paint a very detailed picture of life, associations, political beliefs, and movements and activities within your past.
Kenn White, director of security at database developer MongoDB and director of the Open Crypto Audit Project, said: “Doing a good digital cleaning every now and then is a great habit, especially especially with social networks and old chat messages.” “Who you were five or 10 years ago is probably very different from who you are today, so you should ask yourself, 'Do I really need my kid's inside jokes and sarcastic writings? seven year old child? Do I need to keep my old group chat messages and transfer them to every new phone I get?'”
Some programs like Apple Messages make it easy to automatically delete your chat history after a certain period of time. On iOS, visit Setting > Application > Message then scroll and tap Keep the message. Then choose to keep the message forever, for a year or for 30 days before automatically deleting.
On the free version of Slack, data older than one year is automatically deleted. The company retains data about paid plans forever, unless the administrator establish Delete scroll. This is useful if you have active Slack with your friends, but most people who use Slack at work don't make administrative policy decisions and can't control deletion. Keep this in mind for any communication you do on the employer's platform. You can go through and delete messages or files one at a time, but you probably won't have access to make policy decisions about automatic or bulk deletion.