Google and WhatsApp have confirmed to the Supreme Court that they will retain the data of Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz, according to PUBLICA The country. The prosecutor is being investigated for alleged revelation of secrets By filtering information about an agreement offered by Alberto González Amador’s lawyer, a couple of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to avoid jail for two fiscal crimes.
Politics on the margin, they have opened an interesting debate about true privacy in digital environments.
Why is it important. The case brings to light a non-tan-known technological reality: erasing messages or emails from our devices does not mean that they completely disappear from the servers of technology companies, which can be forced to recover them by judicial orders.
Between bambalins. Messaging applications and mail services maintain backups and records that survive the local erase. WhatsApp does two types of copies: one on the device itself and one in virtual storage that It is managed through Google. This creates a persistent data network difficult to eliminate completely.
The general panoramic. This case exemplifies the complex of the storage architectures used by large technological ones, at the technical and legal level:
- The data is fragmented and doubled on several servers, in turn in several jurisdictions.
- The backups They are made automatically and in the background, often without explicit knowledge of the user.
- Complete data elimination requires concrete actions beyond simple erased in the device.
In detail. The technical procedure to recover “deleted” messages implies several layers:
- Forensic access to local copies through specialized software.
- Request for metadata records (who sent what and when).
- Recovery of backups in the cloud that can remain even after the local erase.
- Analysis of Logs of servers that record the activity of communications.
The authorities are looking for very specific data that technological ones retain despite the local deletion by the user. Message content, multimedia files exchanged, communications metadata and activity and connection records.
The big question. This case illustrates a reality that many users do not know: the elimination of messages on our devices does not guarantee their definitive disappearance.
For the common citizen, this means rethinking what we understand by digital privacy; For professionals in sensitive positions, it implies assuming that any electronic communication could be recovered in a future judicial process, regardless of whether or not it was deleted. Will our communicative habits change when we assume that “erased” may not really be?
Outstanding image | State Council, Dimitri Karastelev in Unspash