Question ^.^ SMS: more than I bargained for

[gn842a]

I assume most people here are familiar with SMS. It helps you transfer messages from one phone to another. I had always assumed that it kept up to 200 messages on each person with whom you correspond and that was that.

Well I installed DocFetcher on my desktop yesterday and let it go to town on indexing my files. I thought it was going to do excel and word and that stuff.

I was extremely surprised when a few of my word searches in DocFetcher brought back text conversations going all the way back to 2010. I don't know if it has every conversation I've had, but there were large excerpts of text conversations from years gone by.

We're not just talking about a service migrating data from phone to phone. This service has migrated text conversation data from Win XP to Win 8.1 (completely new build) and Win 8.1 to Win 10 (another completely new build).

This is something to bear in mind as a security/privacy risk. I don't know whether I'd like all this past stuff deleted or not--and even how to do it. I don't know where it all is.

Greg N

 

[digitalgriffin]

I assume most people here are familiar with SMS. It helps you transfer messages from one phone to another. I had always assumed that it kept up to 200 messages on each person with whom you correspond and that was that.

Well I installed DocFetcher on my desktop yesterday and let it go to town on indexing my files. I thought it was going to do excel and word and that stuff.

I was extremely surprised when a few of my word searches in DocFetcher brought back text conversations going all the way back to 2010. I don't know if it has every conversation I've had, but there were large excerpts of text conversations from years gone by.

We're not just talking about a service migrating data from phone to phone. This service has migrated text conversation data from Win XP to Win 8.1 (completely new build) and Win 8.1 to Win 10 (another completely new build).

This is something to bear in mind as a security/privacy risk. I don't know whether I'd like all this past stuff deleted or not--and even how to do it. I don't know where it all is.

Greg N

If you grant apps access to your SMS, it stores them indefinitely in the cloud. (Facebook Messenger and Google Gmail are common offenders)

So if any app ask for access to your SMS, contacts, or call log (like GMAIL) JUST SAY NO. Unfortunately some useful apps like Android Auto require these access permissions to work properly. So you are screwed if you do and screwed if you don't. People aren't just aware of how much information is being collected on them.

 

[gn842a]

Yes I saw some facebook conversations in there....

I don't know whether SMS has everything or just some things. It looks pretty random. Messages from these past few months do not appear to have been archived. G.

 

[digitalgriffin]

Yes I saw some facebook conversations in there....

I don't know whether SMS has everything or just some things. It looks pretty random. Messages from these past few months do not appear to have been archived. G.

I'm going to take a guess and say you installed facebook messenger at some point and gave it permission to access you SMS. Later you either switched phones and reinstalled without permissions, or revoked permissions on your current install. Facebook has been facing scrutiny over this data collection lately.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...-text-messages-contacts-history-a8274211.html

 

[gn842a]

I'm going to take a guess and say you installed facebook messenger at some point and gave it permission to access you SMS. Later you either switched phones and reinstalled without permissions, or revoked permissions on your current install. Facebook has been facing scrutiny over this data collection lately.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-...-text-messages-contacts-history-a8274211.html

I'm not sure I could say. I do know that I have assiduously avoided letting all these things have access to each other, if I screwed up with facebook messenger it was an accident. I have never given my hotmail password to google or my google password to microsoft. And I have given neither to FB. FB also has some falsified data on birthdate and place of work so as to make ID theft a bit harder.

But yeah this SMS stuff may have gotten past me. I do have calendar synchronization so that might have been the pathway as I use calendars on google and on hotmail.

Greg N