Our reader Gudrun Hübner asks what happens to SMS and E-Mail data happens when you delete it from your computer or cell phone. Are they really gone? – or does anyone else have access to it?
It depends. SMS are usually gone after 48 hours – at least according to Telekom. No delivery attempts will be made to telephones that were currently unreachable. But there are said to be providers who keep such messages for more than 60 days.
How long until the message is delivered?
That’s the basic idea, yes. The situation is different with emails in which several servers are involved. So that of the sender and that of the recipient.
Are SMS stored on the cell phone, i.e. in the device memory or on a chip, or on a server?
Usually only on the devices that sent or received them. The good thing about SMS is that the contact lists from your cell phone are not uploaded to any provider, as is the case with newer messenger services. The latter is highly problematic in terms of data protection law, at least in Europe.
How are messages stored on the newer networks – Signal, Telegram, Tiktok and so on?
This content runs on servers. There they will certainly be scanned by at least some providers, at least if they are supported by advertising. So if they are – at first glance – free. You then pay with your data. These are evaluated to determine which advertising messages should be best received by individual users. That’s why companies are interested in artificial intelligence – this makes it even more precise.
In contrast to SMS, users can decide how and where they save emails. That depends on the program you use, right?
It has more to do with which email protocol you use to receive the messages. If you want to read your emails with different devices, you will usually have the Imap protocol set; The emails remain on a server for the time being. But if you only use one device, the older Pop3 protocol is better. This allows you to download the emails to your computer and they are then deleted from the server.
Many people have multiple devices these days.
Most people read their emails in the browser anyway. And then, as I said, the emails stay stored for a long time if you don’t clean them up.
Is it actually cumbersome to encrypt messages?
This doesn’t work with SMS, as far as I know. This is possible with emails, but I don’t know of any client program where encrypted sending and receiving is conveniently integrated. If so, it costs something.
Why is it so difficult to permanently and without a trace delete data from cell phones or digital cameras?
With conventional magnetic hard drives there is a kind of table of contents. This shows how the data is distributed on the hard drive. The files are not necessarily stored in one piece, but wherever there is space. If you delete data on a hard drive, only the entry in the table of contents disappears. The data remains until it is overwritten by new ones. This principle has remained with chip-based mass storage, but because the memory cells are subject to a certain amount of wear and tear, there is a certain number of memory cells as a reserve. This makes targeted deletion time-consuming.
Sounds pretty complicated.
There is a safe method for destroying data that a former IT colleague from “nd” practiced: You drive a nail through the old hard drive. Then it is definitely no longer readable.
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