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

If you’re worried about possible expansions of government surveillance and access to your information, or simply want to do some digital purging so you’re not saddled with old data, there are a bunch of concrete steps you can take to protect your digital privacy. Just as archeologists study carefully preserved tombs and ancient trash heaps to gain insight into historic communities, your long-forgotten digital footprint could be more revealing and sensitive than you realize. And while you can’t control everything—particularly information stolen in breaches or gathered by data brokers—you probably have a digital attic full of old data that you can delete or download and save offline. First stop? Old message histories.

Chats are a good place to start your digital decluttering. Their real-time nature makes it easy to forget that if you don’t have auto-delete turned on for a chat (or if a platform doesn’t offer it), all of those “be there in 10 minutes,” “wait, what color is this dress???” and “welp, I have covid” messages are still knocking around years later. If you sent them on an end-to-end encrypted platform like Signal or WhatsApp, they only exist on your device and the devices of the other person or people you were chatting with. That means that for governments or bad actors to read them, they would need direct control of your device—a good level of protection, though not foolproof.

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

“Doing a good digital cleaning from time to time is a great habit, especially with social media and old chat messages,” says Kenn White, security principal at the database developer MongoDB and director of the Open Crypto Audit Project. “Who you were five or 10 years ago is probably very different than who you are today, so it’s worth asking yourself, ‘Do I really need those seven-year-old inside jokes and sarcastic posts? Do I need to keep old group chat messages and carry them forward to every new phone I get?’”

Some programs like Apple’s Messages make it easy to auto-delete your chat histories after a set period of time. On iOS, go to Settings > Apps > Messages and then scroll and tap Keep Messages. Then choose whether to keep messages forever, for one 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 forever on paid plans, unless the administrator sets up rolling deletion. This is useful if you have an active Slack with your friends, but most people who use Slack at work don’t make decisions about administrative policies and can’t control deletion. Keep this in mind for any communication you do on an employer’s platforms. You may be able to go through and delete messages or files one by one, but you likely won’t have the access to make policy decisions about automatic or batch deletion.