A Texting Truth Often Forgotten in Politics: Your Phone Remembers Everything

Re:A Texting Truth Often Forgotten in Politics: Your Phone R... by Frqy3 on Monday August 15, 2016 @07:14AM (#12289651)

And the networks on both the sender's and receiver's side keep a copy of the messages for a certain time. Depending on local data retention laws, these may then be kept for some mandatory longer period.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Texting Truth Often Forgotten in Politics: Your Phone R... by exDM69 on Monday August 15, 2016 @08:04AM (#12289868)

It's a good idea to assume that texts are stored forever. There's no technical reason to remove ~140 bytes of data when storage is cheap.

Your local data retention laws and the network's practices may vary or they may be under pressure from law enforcement to keep things longer than necessary. They will not disclose in public how long they are stored, so better assume forever.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Texting Truth Often Forgotten in Politics: Your Phone R... by __s on Monday August 15, 2016 @08:06AM (#12289879)

Especially when that 140 bytes is text, one of the most compressible forms of data

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Texting Truth Often Forgotten in Politics: Your Phone R... by draugadrotten on Monday August 15, 2016 @08:02AM (#12289858)

and the networks also keep more than just the messages: they keep the location the phones where at when sending and receiving the messages. and the locations of any other phones nearby, at the same time.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Texting Truth Often Forgotten in Politics: Your Phone R... by JoshTriplett on Monday August 15, 2016 @12:02PM (#12291298)

That much you can protect against with end-to-end encryption.

[ Parent | on HN ]