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Comment by mikro2nd | Hacker News Reader

"Do people not consider their chat histories valuable?"

No, I consider them a positive liability and delete messages/conversations as soon as they're done/actioned.

When the Brown Shirts come to get you, it'll be your own message history they hang you with. (Only slightly :))

Question: You have your SMS history going back a decade. How many times has that proven useful?

I, too, used to keep messages & emails "forever" until I realised that it was doing nothing for me but becoming a maintenance burden. Now I have "max 24 months" retention policy and have never once needed to retrieve an email older than that.

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Same. After reading the first point my reaction was "Why would I want that?" Of course, people are different, but I think in digital world there are much more hoarders than in physical.

I save love letters / emails / texts, tax docs

All else, purge every year

> When the Brown Shirts come to get you, it'll be your own message history they hang you with. (Only slightly :))

There are certainly some countries where this isn't a hyperbole. But in all others, suggesting that Nazis might come take you away because of messages you've written in the past is in pretty bad taste, IMO.

Would it have been in bad taste to say it during Hindenburg's administration? Your personal data may be more durable than benign government.

tell it to those cancelled for decade old tweets

> There are certainly some countries where this isn't a hyperbole.

> suggesting that Nazis might come take you away because of messages you've written in the past is in pretty bad taste

These two statements seem conflicting. If we're already seeing it in places why should we not be concerned? It may be unlikely to happen here and to us, but why take the chance? The risk-reward tradeoff is extremely unbalanced. Like the above commenter said, how often do you go back in your history?

As a more real west experience we do see morals changing and we have been going through cultural changes. There are plenty of people who have had tweets uncovered with positions they themselves no longer agree with. That's a question people are trying to address right now but it is a difficult one to have because it is so heated. But it does boil down to "do people change opinions?" Personally I think the answer is obvious. But it is undeniable that history gets people in trouble, even if those histories were popular opinions at the time. (I wouldn't draw parallels to Brown Shirts with these instances as there's a big difference in scale and power, but I would draw parallels to Brown Shirts for countries with authoritarian rules where text histories are large liabilities and can get you killed or jailed).

> No, I consider them a positive liability and delete messages/conversations as soon as they're done/actioned.

Does other side delete it too? Otherwise if you delete you create a bigger liability in case the other side start claiming things that have not happened. For that reason it's vital to keep an audit trail and of course you need to have good op sec with that.

If we're considering it a liability issues then I'm not sure this question isn't super important. You can't control that side. But you can control your side and reduce your liability. It won't reduce it to zero, but clearly it has reduced your liability.

This is especially true if we're talking about targeted attacks it is a lot harder to find all your previous contacts and then search through those to find something to hang you on. Your side is consolidated and easily searchable. The other side is distributed.

Though I kinda miss old text messaging where you only had 250 texts max.

> control your side and reduce your liability

if your actions (or messages) are a liability, then why make them in the first place?

If you deleted your messages, it doesn't delete the record (from someone else's phone, for example, like a screenshot).

If the adversary is powerful enough (like a state actor), it matters not what your phone history is, because they can pin something on you anyway.

> if your actions (or messages) are a liability, then why make them in the first place?

They may not be to begin with. Think changing morals or changing governments. Also I really hate this sentiment in general. Your solution is to just censor yourself. We're talking about about the abstract here.

> If you deleted your messages, it doesn't delete the record (from someone else's phone, for example, like a screenshot).

I feel like I literally addressed this above in my second paragraph. It's much harder to search multiple phones than a single phone that has all the information consolidated. Security is not about being bulletproof but that your are sufficiently difficult to attack. This distributed version of your data is harder to attack. That's the advantage.

> If the adversary is powerful enough (like a state actor), it matters not what your phone history is, because they can pin something on you anyway.

1) better something made up than something real. One is harder to fight and requires more resources for them.

2) what's the point of this comment? Are we just supposed to give up? No fighting back? This statement is always going to be true but isn't a meaningful trump card.

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