Hey, Maybe It’s Time To Delete Your Chat History

If you’re worried about increased government control and access to your information, or just want to clean up your digital data so you don’t get bogged down with old data, there’s a group of specific steps you can take protecting your digital privacy. Just as archaeologists carefully study preserved tombs and piles of ancient debris to learn more about ancient communities, what you’ve long forgotten can be more revealing and insightful than you realize. And while you may not be able to control everything, especially information stolen illegally or collected by data hackers – you probably have a digital vault full of old data that you can delete or download and keep offline. First stop? The history of the message.

Social media is a great place to start de-digitalizing. Their real-time features make it easy to forget that if you don’t have automatic withdrawals to chat (or if the platform doesn’t exist), all those “be there in 10 minutes,” “wait.” , What color is this dress????” and “welp, i have covid” messages are still knocking years later. If you sent them on an end-to-end locked platform like A symbol or WhatsAppavailable only on your device and the devices of another person or people you chat with. This means that in order for governments or malicious actors to read it, they may need to gain direct access to your device – a good, albeit foolproof, security.

What matters, however, is the messages you sent on social networking apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger more about his historyand Google Chat/Hangouts/Gchat are sitting on a cloud server somewhere. And although they are stored in encrypted form to protect against theft, the platform itself has the keys to decrypt your data and can track government requests, no matter how many years it is. Of course, all of this may seem trivial at this point, but years and years of chat history can give you a detailed picture of your life, associations, political beliefs, movements and past activities.

“Periodically cleaning digital data is a great practice, especially with social media and old social media,” says Kenn White, director of security at the MongoDB database and leader of the Open Crypto Audit Project. “The way you were five or 10 years ago is probably very different from the way you are today, so it’s good to ask yourself, ‘Do I really need jokes and satire for seven-year-olds?’ Do I have to save old social media messages and send them to every new phone I get?’”

Some apps like Apple Messages make it easy to delete your chat history after a while. On iOS, go to Favorites > Software > Messages and then swipe and click Save Messages. Then choose to keep messages forever, for one year, or for 30 days before deleting.

In the free version of Slack, data older than a year is automatically deleted. The company keeps the data permanently on the paid plans, except as an administrator they establish roll deleted. This is useful if you have Slack for work with colleagues, but most people who use Slack at work do not make decisions about the management of the work and cannot prevent deletion. Keep this in mind for any interactions you make on employer platforms. You can go through and delete messages or files one by one, but you may not have the ability to make decisions about whether or not to delete them.