I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since.
There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.
Just out of interest, why are you keeping your chat history? What for? All my chats are set to burn after 6 months as standard but most are shorter than this.
I can't think of anything beyond a month is need to search for. And I'm definitely not interested in having it just in case. If it's important I'll write it down.
I'm also not a social media user.
How many people have been caught out over shit they've said decades ago that is now not fashionable to say?
What parts of your old chat histories can get you in trouble if the police got hold of your phone?
I mean... none of mine, that's for sure, nor am I expecting to get in trouble for anything I've said in the past. I don't customarily do things I wouldn't be okay with somebody finding out about, and if did find something out and decided to become angry at me, that's on them for being a shitty person and doesn't really bother me. Nor am I expecting anyone to be looking at my history other than me anyway; that's why my phone has a passcode.
I personally keep it all (on iMessage) as a bit of personal history. Trying to see conversations I had with friends and family around fun/important events, searching to see if I ever went on a similar tirade about a product I’m about to send a friend…
If you, after 20 years, can process all your chat history with a (locally run!) AI, you may find a lot of interesting things about yourself and your friends.
It is much more likely that someone else will process all my chat history at a border checkpoint or somewhere similar and find out a lot of interesting things about me and my friends.
> Don't keep it all on your phone and unencrypted.
I've had a 90-day message retention policy set in WhatsApp ever since the feature became available. Not because I doubt my ability to manage secure backups, but because I don't expect my contacts to act equally careful.
I wish Signal supported a 90-day retention period. Four weeks (Signal max) is often too short for my contacts, which leads people to disable it altogether.
I also find it frustrating that Signal only applies your message retention policy to the conversation when you initiate the conversation, not when others do. As a result, more of my conversations end up being ephemeral on WhatsApp than on Signal, which feels a bit ironic.
If you really care about it, you should probably pursue anonymity on the Internet, too. The worldwide data collection from websites is far more concerning and harder to deal with. I use Qubes-Whonix for that.
Yep, this is why Signal hasn’t gained great traction I think. It’s just not intuitive (and I don’t understand why it’s necessary). You could always have this level of security as an option for journalists etc without ruining the UX of all users.
To be fair Whatsapp works the same, if you are not careful when changing phone you will lose your history. That's because they don't actually store your messages on their servers, they are just synchronized between devices.
That's not the case though, at least for me? I had set Whatsapp to backup to Google Drive, and when I switched to an iPhone it did some automagix and all my stuff was there (and then backed up to iCloud!).
I have Signal on my phone and laptop. For some reason my laptop desynced from the phone, so my chat history now has a missing block of message history (that exists on the phone). I did nothing obvious to cause that desync. My guess is that my phone updated the Signal app, and I didn't update it on the laptop in lockstep. That's not a great UX, especially since there is no notification that this might happen.
Message history still can’t be backed up on iOS, and also can’t be moved between Android and iOS in either direction AFAIK. There are far more gaps here than just imperfect users, which is often a UX problem as others have noted.
I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since.
There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.