My memory's not great, and it's good to be able to double-check if I've talked about something with someone before, or to find old links/information shared ("damnit, what was her niece called again? I'll sound like an idiot asking her for the third time"). Or stuff like "remember when you told me X?" - just to have evidence to clear things up, or to be able to refer to conversations in the distant past from time to time.
Does it matter? People care. People don't want to lose years worth of chat histories with friends, family and their significant other(s). That's just how it is. I'm not sure why it's so hotly debated around here. People want to preserve their chats and their media. There's sentimental/emotional value to these things and they don't want to lose these things. That's all that should matter. I feel like these discussions always get bogged down in "but why", particularly from people who have a different opinion, when it's irrelevant. People value things differently. Just because their values are different from yours doesn't make them any less justified than you. This is reality. This is people.
If Signal wants to provide a mainstream secure and private alternative to WhatsApp, then it needs to make concessions to accommodate these preferences. If they don't want to, that's fine, but it also means I can't recommend Signal to non-tech friends/family.
It matters because people don't always realize that it means making trade-off's. And people often don't know what the consequences can be of those trade-offs because they didn't realise it was a trade-off to begin with.
In case of whatsapp and keeping chat history it can mean years of chat history becoming public if for example your Apple / Google account (where whatsapp automatically stores your conversation backups) gets hacked.
Do you think the people on Parler would have used the DM function if they had realised all those DM's could become public one day? Of course not. But they simply didn't realize that the "handy" DM function meant those messages were stored somewhere and that in turns means it can all get public one day.
> In case of whatsapp and keeping chat history it can mean years of chat history becoming public if for example your Apple / Google account (where whatsapp automatically stores your conversation backups) gets hacked.
This just isn't the threat model most people care about, nor do they have to. Given a choice between preserving their chat history with their loved ones and not having any of it in the off chance that it might be leaked somewhere, the vast majority of people will opt for the former. Once you value chat history and other media in this way, then the risk simply isn't relevant. Again, this is all irrelevant. You people keep thinking on this one track of "but it's not secure" when that isn't the overriding concern for these people. It needs to be secure enough while not completely disregarding one of their core needs (preserving history). It's non-negotiable and no amount of discussing of risk or privacy will change this. Again, I find it insufferable that tech people are so unwilling to take normal peoples' needs into account.
Signal has the opportunity to become the default secure messaging app while also providing "secure" backups. They don't even need to be cloud backups, though that would be preferred. Even local backups can be sufficient. But as long as they don't account for the needs of "normal" people, Signal isn't a real option.
If I go to my friend's girlfriend and say, here's this awesome secure messaging app that you need to switch to and she switches, then something happens to her phone and she loses all her precious chats, how do you think that's going to go over? I can blabber on about privacy and risks all I want, I'm still the asshole.
> In case of whatsapp and keeping chat history it can mean years of chat history becoming public if for example your Apple / Google account (where whatsapp automatically stores your conversation backups) gets hacked.
IIRC the backups aren't stored in plaintext. They are encrypted with a key known to the device and whatsapp. The key is restored to a new device by whatsapp after SMS authentication.
Hence only a Google Drive compromise will not lead to full chat history compromise. That also requires something like a Sim Swap attack.
This is me. It's like the old shoe-box of postcards which is in the attic a year or two at a time. I still keep an old device with messages from someone whom I will never meet again. It is emotional and I sometimes reminisce by charging the device and scroll through the messages.
Messages are like email. I never delete them. Situations arrive where I have to go look into past messages to see what conversations I had around several dates.
I used my whatsapp chat history to successfully contest a traffic fine.
My parents wanted me to check on their house while they were away. I messaged them on whatsapp when I left my house and then again when I arrived at theirs.
A month or so after my trip I was sent a fine for not displaying my car license while my car was parked on a public road. I had driven down the road where the fine was recorded during the trip. Using the timestamps of the whatsapp messages I was able to show that there was not enough time during my trip for me to have stopped to park.
> A month or so after my trip I was sent a fine for not displaying my car license while my car was parked on a public road. I had driven down the road where the fine was recorded during the trip.
More of an aside, but what sort of car license must be displayed for parking but not for driving down the same road? Is it some sort of parking permit or disc?
A car license is required when driving or parked but the fine was issued to a parked car without a driver in it. I proved that I was driving the car when the ticket was issued so the claims made by the metro officer about how they issued the ticket were not true.
My car was licensed at the time and the license was displayed correctly. I was not guilty of the offense and the whatsapp messages allowed me to prove that the officer who issued the ticket was lying.
It's nice to store any information that's nice to have, but not important enough to expressly record somewhere. "search, don't sort" applies especially well to this kind of info.
Addresses were already mentioned, but that also applies to IBAN, email addresses, door codes, restaurants...
It's also some kind of light diary: you can easily deduce what you were doing on a certain day if you look at the corresponding message.
For me it's not important enough that I would want to migrate it to another app if I were switching (I'd just save the DB), but it's not completely useless either. And of course some people just store everything there, including things that were not messages in the first, just like they do with email. You can argue that they shouldn't, but if that's what they want...
Obviously that's also a privacy risk, e.g. in case you lose your phone. There are many countries where I wouldn't keep my chat history for more than one week.
Personally I read messages, keep them only long enough to take action (when that's necessary) and then delete them. I don't want my brain cluttered by dozens/hundreds/thousands of ancient, no-longer-relevant messages. Furthermore, when the blackshirts come to get you, it's your own old messages they'll use to hang you. Get rid of them, I say.
Some messages include information I need to go back and refer to. eg a recent example for me was a relative sent me dimensions for a piece of furniture they were getting rid of and offered to me so I needed to check if it fit in the space I was thinking of. I couldn't check when they sent me the message so I needed to go back and check later.
But many of us have usecases for looking back at conversations from months ago, so just telling people "you don't need it" isn't likely to get you very far.
Personally I just read incoming message and never "scroll back".