How long are those records kept?

Some want internet records kept forever, others not at all. What can you count on?

Transcript

This is Leo Notenboom for askleo.info.

A very common concern I hear deals with record keeping. No, not your own,
but rather the records that might be kept by the various service providers that
we use every day on the internet.

And I head it from both sides.

One group of folks are trying to recover or track something, and they’re
hoping that their mail provider, IM provider, or ISP will have kept all the logs
or messages that they’re looking for. Forever, it seems, since I’ve had people
request the ability to recover email from their free email provider for as far
back as six years.

Then there are the other folks. The ones who apparently have something to
hide. They want to know if their emails, access logs, or IM conversations have
been kept, and if so for how long they’ll be kept. A very common question is
how to ensure that they’re not kept, or how to somehow expunge any that have
been kept.

Fortunately the answer to both is quite simple.

Unfortunately the answer to both is quite frustrating.

I don’t know.

In fact, it’s unlikely that anyone outside of the specific
providers would know, and they aren’t telling. And whatever their answer might
be, it’s almost certainly different for every ISP, every email provider, and
every IM service that might exist and in fact might well be different this
week than it was last week.

The service provider’s problem is two fold: keeping track of historical data
like that gets extremely expensive the longer and more completely you keep it.
And going public about their policies simply invites a flood of requests that
must somehow be dealt with.

From a practical standpoint all this boils down to a very simple and
pragmatic position for the average user: assume the worst.

It’s safer that way.

If you’re trying to hide something, assume that everything is kept forever
and can be retrieved with a court order. Use techniques such as encryption to
make sure that your communications, once retrieved, can’t be deciphered.

If you rely on some service and you’d ever think of trying to recover or
track something using them, assume you can’t. Instead put into place backup and
other mechanisms of your own that you control.

And therein lies the bottom line: take responsibility for what you can, be
it something like encrypting your sensitive communications, or something else
like making sure that your Windows Live Hotmail isn’t the only place you keep
your address book.

Your service provider is not likely to be a safety net in any reasonable
way.

I’d love to hear what you think. Visit askleo.info and enter 12068 in the go
to article number box to access the show notes, the transcript and to leave me
a comment. While you’re there, browse the hundreds of technical questions and
answers on the site.

Till next time, I’m Leo Notenboom, for askleo.info.