Tracking text and emails

[scottmandue]

I may be a tech but I'm not in the communications end of the profession (I'm more of a A/V guy).

We watch a lot (probably too many) cop shows... and of course the first thing they do is pull up a year (or two) of the perps emails and texts... even I know that emails get piled up in cyberland somewhere. Heck, even locally on my computer the they get deleted to the trash folder and we all know after you delete it from your hard drive it can be recovered... and I know to some degree the servers pile up a history of the emails that travel through them.

But how about texts... seems like as soon as I delete a text thread from my phone *poof* it is gone. I am pretty sure they are also piling up somewhere but I have to wonder with the massive amount of texts and emails flying around how long can they hold onto/track them?

Just trying to separate TV tech from real world tech.

[stomachmonkey]

To / from / when persists in a lot of places for as long as log files are kept.

Content is a bit more infrastructure dependent.

As in who has control of the systems on either end and what are their retention policies.

[id10t]

I find that using /dev/null instead of a tape drive makes for much faster backups

[KFC911]

It's safe to say that every gmail ever is retrievable along with every one I ever sent/received on the corporate side too.
And the volume of network trace type data we used to archive dwarfed that even....but it takes resources, time and skill.

[masraum]

If you work for a large or public company, it's entirely possible and likely that they are keeping all of your emails and any chat (Lync, AIM, Skype, etc...) that you do on a work computer. Is T-mobile keeping all over every customer's texts for a year? Is Yahoo keeping all of every customer's email for a year? I doubt it. I do think it's pretty likely that they have a day, a week, a month or maybe a little more, but I doubt they have to keep much.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by KC911

It's safe to say that every gmail ever is retrievable along with every one I ever sent/received on the corporate side too.
And the volume of network trace type data we used to archive dwarfed that even....but it takes resources, time and skill.

True, I do believe Google is keeping all of that stuff. I guess from that point of view, it would be weird if yahoo wasn't.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by masraum

If you work for a large or public company, it's entirely possible and likely that they are keeping all of your emails and any chat (Lync, AIM, Skype, etc...) that you do on a work computer. Is T-mobile keeping all over every customer's texts for a year? Is Yahoo keeping all of every customer's email for a year? I doubt it. I do think it's pretty likely that they have a day, a week, a month or maybe a little more, but I doubt they have to keep much.

SKYPE is certainly not peer to peer.

It retains your chat history for forever.

The real tell is large file transfers.

They will clear your box and there will be a delay, how long is dependent on the size of the file, before it shows on the recipients end as available to fetch.

Meaning, there is a middle man.

[djmcmath]

The NSA is storing enormous amounts of bulk-collected surveillance data. I'm not totally sure what all is included, or for how long, but anything from SnapChats to text messages to e-mails and even phone calls is stored for some period of time.

[GH85Carrera]

Basing anything on a TV is pretty silly. ON TV they can zoom in on a video and hit the enhance button and presto chango the resolution is perfect. That is 100% pure fiction. Some of that started long ago on TV. I remember an episode of the original Hawaii 50 that a tourist took a photo out a bus window of the ʻIolani Palace with a Kodak 110 camera and the 50 team blew the photo of the bad guy up and it looked like a studio portrait of the bad guy. You can't make a decent 8x10 from 110 film much less plow up a tiny part of the image.

No doubt any big corporation or government organization has to keep a copy of everything sent on company equipment. If the Feds have you under investigation, it is likely they are archiving all your communications. Now days with a modern smart phone and a simple delete it will most likely be gone forever fairly soon. They will have a record of the phone call time and duration and what number was on the other end, but not the content of the call.

[scottmandue]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Basing anything on a TV is pretty silly. ON TV they can zoom in on a video and hit the enhance button and presto chango the resolution is perfect. That is 100% pure fiction. Some of that started long ago on TV. I remember an episode of the original Hawaii 50 that a tourist took a photo out a bus window of the ʻIolani Palace with a Kodak 110 camera and the 50 team blew the photo of the bad guy up and it looked like a studio portrait of the bad guy. You can't make a decent 8x10 from 110 film much less blow up a tiny part of the image.

So you are saying they can't zoom into a reflection from a low rez ATM security camera off a 58 VW hub cap from across the street and do a facial recognition scan from that?

I do know a little about A/V and I also chuckle at the same scenes where they do impossible zooms and blow ups... at work I have been handed old low rez videos and asked if I can 'convert' them to 1080... I say yes, but it will look like dooky. Audio and Video is/can only be as good as the source material.
I also doubt that the agencies resident computer genius can hack into the FBI/CIA/NSA database with a few tipity taps of the keyboard.

But back to talking about text... just look at any teenagers phone bill and there are ten pages of texts listed... multiply that by how many teenagers there are and I would not be surprised the that came to millions of text a day... and that is just the teenagers.

Add in all the adults texting (some while driving) and it boggles my mind to think that anyone could track all of that.

I work with around 250 employees and they have to dump the emails off the server every three months just to make room.

[wdfifteen]

With all the news about the Amazon Echo lately it has me wondering. Siri obviously listens to you even when you haven't summoned it, otherwise it wouldn't know when it was being summoned. So you are under surveillance anytime you are near your iPhone. Is there anything to keep that surveillance from being monitored or recorded?

[sc_rufctr]

If you're feeling paranoid look at this. https://www.torproject.org

Basically it leaves no foot prints.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

...Is there anything to keep that surveillance from being monitored or recorded?

Of course there is.

What you want to be asking is, is it effective?

Other than not having that **** in your home, no.

[HardDrive]

Originally Posted by masraum

If you work for a large or public company, it's entirely possible and likely that they are keeping all of your emails and any chat (Lync, AIM, Skype, etc...) that you do on a work computer.

Not our company. 6 months and it's gone.

[GH85Carrera]

One of my friends said his daughter was up to 10,000 text message PER MONTH!

We started doing the calculations and it was over 30 per minute if you only sleep a few hours a day. And that is just one teenager.

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

Of course there is.

What you want to be asking is, is it effective?

Other than not having that **** in your home, no.

IOW Siri is the devil.
I will begin storing my iPhone in the toilet tank.

[scottmandue]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

One of my friends said his daughter was up to 10,000 text message PER MONTH!

We started doing the calculations and it was over 30 per minute if you only sleep a few hours a day. And that is just one teenager.

Exactly my point, when my brother got his daughter her first iPhone the bill that came back and it was a small book of pages (he immediately put her unlimited text/data and went to paperless billing)

It is not a question of if they can track out text/emails but when you consider the amount of data flying though the air/internet at any given moment how could anyone keep up with the massive volume of info?

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

IOW Siri is the devil.
I will begin storing my iPhone in the toilet tank.

Not really.

SIRI's auto listen is only available on iOS9 and 6's or better devices.

The way it works is two part.

When you set up the device and opt to use SIRI you have to record yourself saying "Hey SIRI"

That voiceprint gets stored locally on the device and that's all it listens for.

When it hears it it compares it to the stored voiceprint and if it matches only then is networking enabled.

Anything she does send to a server to fulfill a query is randomly hashed so there are no unique identifiers.

XBox, Amazon Echo (Alexa) and the google device all work the same. They only listen for and respond to a "wake" word or phrase.

So the question now becomes, how much do we trust that the tech is what we are told it is and is it hackable.

I have a high trust level for Apple. Not enough first hand experience with the others to make a value judgement.

What you really want to worry about is devices like voice enabled smart TV's.

They have been shown on numerous occasions to listen and send audio even when the feature has been disabled.

I don't trust Samsung because of this. They are on record as not being upfront.

[atcjorg]

had to deal with text messages in a court case, each phone company has their own retention policies and are typically very short windows of availability(court order /subpoena). Otherwise it's just on the 2 devices sender/receiver. The phone companies don't want to get into the business of archiving texts, work with no revenue.