THE ACTUAL NUMBER of chat messages sent each day is hard to come by, but with WhatsApp alone accounting for billions of users, you can imagine the sheer volume of ongoing conversations. Not all of those messages involve anything particularly sensitive or private, but a lot of them do—and you don’t want those chats to be seen by anyone other than the intended recipients. Good messaging hygiene might involve changing apps or tweaking a setting, but it’s important that you don’t neglect it. These five recommendations can get you started.
First: Switch to End-to-End Encryption
When instant messenger chats are end-to-end encrypted, they’re essentially turned into impenetrable blocks of data. Only the devices of the person (or people) you’re chatting with have the codes to unlock that data, which ensures no one else can read your messages while they’re in transit. Not even the developers behind the software you’re using can unlock that data, so if an unscrupulous employee wanted to take a peek at your chats, they wouldn’t be able to. If law enforcement requested copies of the conversations, there wouldn’t be anything useful to hand over to them. Some instant messengers use end-to-end encryption, but not all of them do.
