Maybe it's time to delete some old chat histories

Hello, and welcome to WIRED Start: your weekly roundup of the most important stories, landing in your inbox every Monday. Don’t forget, you can get the very latest from WIRED with our daily newsletter. Sign up to receive it for free here.?

This week WIRED Start takes a look into the dangers of old messages being available online, and how you can protect your sensitive information with some digital decluttering.

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, 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.

Read the full story here.

Get ahead with these recommended reads

US Treasury Department Admits It Got Hacked by China

Treasury says hackers accessed “certain unclassified documents” in a “major” breach, but experts believe the attack’s impacts could prove to be more significant, writes Lily Hay Newman .

Read the full story here.

A Book App Used AI to ‘Roast’ Its Users. It Went Anti-Woke Instead

One year-end summary from Fable, a social app where people share what books they read, told the user, “Don’t forget to surface for the occasional white author, OK?”

Read the full story here.

Elon Musk Is Posting Nonstop Falsehoods About ‘Grooming Gangs’

Musk’s posts, which have racked up hundreds of millions of views on X, are his latest effort at inserting himself into UK politics, writes David Gilbert .

Read the full story here.

Editors at Science Journal Resign En Masse Over Bad Use of AI, High Fees

Members of the Elsevier-published Journal of Human Evolution quit, citing AI production processes introducing errors, high author fees, and concerns over editorial independence.

Read the full story here.

Until next time

Thank you for reading! We'll be back next Monday with another WIRED Start. Until then, you can unlock unlimited access to WIRED’s content with a subscription.