# Prompted by the Jones case: Is all digital data really saved and retrievable? The mind boggles **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 5, 2022, 10:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133 "2022-08-05T10:59:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [August 5, 2022, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/21 "2022-08-05T17:43:40Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > I thought I read somewhere in the news that they had a full dump of his phone including texts _going back two years._ Which implies your first thought was correct, he simply bought the phone with the biggest amount of storage and never deleted anything. I have texts on my phone going back like a decade, and I don’t buy phones with a ton of storage. Text messages, by their nature, simply don’t take up much space. When I get a new phone, I back up the old one and transfer it over, so it still has all my texts. According to my phone my text messages are taking up about 10G of the 64G of space on my phone, of which about 6G is a year or more old (presumably I’m sending and receiving more pictures than I did 8 years ago, which is most of that space). ---
**Author:** ![WatchMe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8797f3/32.png) [@WatchMe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WatchMe)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/22 "2022-08-06T01:59:16Z")
Cell providers [don’t actually keep](https://www.reference.com/world-view/long-text-messages-stored-1d3c3e91465f53fc) copies of your texts for long, if at all. They do keep details of who texted who and when for a certain period of time, usually several years, but the contents of the text are sometimes not kept at all and, if they are, usually only for a few days. The best description for the data Alex Jones’ lawyers sent is a digital copy of his cellphone which includes text messages. The lawyers didn’t actually look through the data and don’t really know what all it contains, but were quoted as saying they saw some texts that were two or more years old. If he deleted any messages in the last couple of years, they’re gone. ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/23 "2022-08-06T12:55:19Z")
The nice thing about digital data is that it can be searched - especially text. Given a complete collection of texts, a search for keywords - or specific combinations, date ranges, etc. - can quickly find many relevant texts. Nobody needs to read and remember 6GB of data to find a relevant text. You might even program “when you find a keyword show me 3 texts before and after the relevant one” to ensure the context is there, that you aren’t missing important details because the relevant issue was simply referred to as “that thing” in another text… Other tools apply OCR (optical character recognition) to convert images of documents into text. As more complex cases generate millions of pages of evidence, these tools for lawyers have gotten amazingly proficient at zooming in on relevant data, combing hay for needles. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/24 "2022-08-06T13:27:44Z")
> [@saje](#): > > can his past search history be dug up and used as proof against him? Your device does not store your search history per se. It stores a history of what sites you’ve been to, and I suppose that can include search results, but I haven’t tried to look at my own browser history to see if this can be retrieved. Search engine sites, most notably Google, do store it so they can optimize your results (two people searching for exactly the same terms will not get the same results, depending on their location and other previous activity known to Google). Using a privacy mode, like Google Incognito, will not store any history locally, but Google will still know what you are searching for. I am not familiar with how this works for a browser specifically designed for privacy, like Duck Duck Go. ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/25 "2022-08-06T13:31:14Z")
> [@CookingWithGas](#): > > I haven’t tried to look at my own browser history to see if this can be retrieved. I have, the search “_I searched for this_” (on Google) is saved in every browser I can remember using. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/26 "2022-08-06T14:16:08Z")
> [@crowmanyclouds](#): > > I have, the search “_I searched for this_” (on Google) is saved in every browser I can remember using. How do I see this in Chrome? I can login to my Google account to find my search history but that is not local to my machine. ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/27 "2022-08-06T14:19:11Z")
Browser history not Google’s. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/28 "2022-08-06T14:23:16Z")
@CookingWithGas Google searches are sent via URL. For eaxmple, if you search for “hello kitty”, you actually open a URL that starts like this: [https://www.google.com/search?q=hello+kitty](https://www.google.com/search?q=hello+kitty). So if you have all the URLs you’ve visited in a certain period, that also inherently includes all the searches you’ve done. And, no, it’s not just Google who does it this way. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/29 "2022-08-06T14:38:35Z")
> [@crowmanyclouds](#): > > Browser history not Google’s. Right, I got that. What I did not pay attention to is that in Chrome, once you select Settings \> History, you only see recent history. To see the full history you must click History _again_. Which I never needed to do before so I never noticed. So I retract my statement that search history is not stored. It’s stored as part of browsing history (though there is no “Get Search History” command built in). ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/30 "2022-08-06T15:02:06Z")
For some perspective: It is estimated there are about 23 billion text messages sent everyday worldwide (270,000 every second). If we go with your number that means they have enough storage for over 59,500 years of text messages. ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/31 "2022-08-06T20:17:46Z")
Interestiing case mentioned on CNN - > **[One Google search can make you a suspect — this legal case might make that...](https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/1/23191406/denver-arson-google-keyword-warrant-challenge-constitutional-fourth-amendment-privacy)** > > Privacy groups fear search keyword data could be weaponized post-Roe. > A search that encompasses the data of all Google users may be “one of the broadest searches in Fourth Amendment history,” the motion argues. > “No court has considered the legality of a reverse keyword search, but its constitutional defects are readily apparent and should have been obvious to all involved. It is a 21st century version of the general warrants that the Fourth Amendment was designed to guard against. Just as no warrant could authorize the search of every home in America, no warrant can compel a search of everyone’s Google queries.” The lawyer is not wrong - asking Google for whoever searched for a keyword is like allowing police to search every home in America looking for one gun in one particular crime. Or… it could be used to see who googles for abortion clinic information. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/32 "2022-08-06T20:43:24Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > … > I wonder if perhaps this was deliberately passive-aggressive? Was there, say, a junior lawyer on staff sufficiently revulsed by Jones that they decided to “make a mistake” with the data or deliberately misinterpret instructions? > … The opposing law firm is legally required to notify his law firm if the answers sent to a discovery request include additional information not named in the discovery request. (Like this info.) The plaintiffs’ firm says they did so, and then waited the required number of days for his law firm to respond with a more limited data dump. Since his firm did not do so, they are legally allowed to look at all the data they were sent, and use it in court. (Jones lawyers are objecting to that, but it seems a settled part of legal procedure, that they are not likely to win.) Now we don’t know the format of the notification letter the plaintiffs’ lawyers sent to Jones’ lawyers. It may have been deliberately written to fool a low-level clerk into thinking it was just a form communication between law firms. Or it may have been written to sound like a complaint where the plaintiffs’ were whining about being ‘flooded with details’. Whatever, the result was that Jones’ lawyers let their response period expire without taking action, so the plaintiffs are now free to make use of that info. Having accurate records is really bad when you are lying all over the place, especially in court under oath! ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/33 "2022-08-06T21:15:18Z")
> [@bump](#): > > The answer as always, is “it depends”. > > Your phones store text messages as long as you tell them to, or as long as you have storage space to do so. Emails are similar, except that often they’re stored on a remote server somewhere, and not on your phone. And most people keep their emails forever. > > Phones and computers log and store all sorts of other stuff- what websites you visited, what you downloaded, what you did while there, etc… Again, all this is usually configurable, but very few people actually configure it. Phone companies/ISPs log another whole set of data - where you were (as identified by the cell tower), what you were doing, what IP you were coming from, etc… > > So if they can get a subpoena of the phone, they can take an exact, bit-for-bit digital copy of it, and at that point, they have _everything_ on his phone that he did at that moment in time. I’m not sure how it works with say… Gmail, and clients set to automatically log in. There may be another level of legal requesting needed to go through that. > > But some text I sent five years ago on a different phone? I’m pretty sure that’s not going to be stored by my phone company or ISP, and if someone has it, it’s the NSA or some foreign intelligence service. It depends was going to be my answer too. Don’t delete it on your phone and your phone will most likely keep it forever. Carriers have no reason to keep that much data. Storage is expensive. Whenever I have had to do a warrant for data the first thing I did is send a preservation letter. It’s a request to not delete data for an upcoming search warrant. Most companies comply but it’s often too late. Verizon can give you about a weeks worth of texts. Most carriers have much less. It just doesn’t make economic sense to keep the data for longer. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/34 "2022-08-06T21:30:15Z")
Does such a letter have any legal force? If you send an ISP a preservation letter, and then they go ahead with their regularly-scheduled weekly deletion, are they in trouble? Or does it just depend on them being willing to cooperate? ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/35 "2022-08-06T21:51:53Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > The lawyer is not wrong - asking Google for whoever searched for a keyword is like allowing police to search every home in America looking for one gun in one particular crime. Or… it could be used to see who googles for abortion clinic information. I’d put it more like checking out who all checked out the Anarchist’s Cookbook at the library. I’d venture to guess that there’s relevant case law in this general realm. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [August 6, 2022, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/36 "2022-08-06T22:44:40Z")
I would imagine unless it’s an actual subpoena or search warrant, it probably doesn’t. That said, if a person knows that they’re going to court, or AFAIK even knows they _might_ have done something that may eventually land them in court, and they delete/destroy data, they’re on the hook for spoliation of evidence. The ISP isn’t though, unless somehow they’re wound up in the court case, and end up deleting stuff outside of their usual purge policy. ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2022, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/37 "2022-08-07T01:25:09Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Does such a letter have any legal force? If you send an ISP a preservation letter, and then they go ahead with their regularly-scheduled weekly deletion, are they in trouble? Or does it just depend on them being willing to cooperate? It does not have the force of a court order. However for most companies it’s actually part of their policy that they request a letter of preservation to be sent. It is in the best interest of these companies to both protect the data of their customers from improper intrusion but also to comply with legal court orders. US based companies anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Whack-a-Mole](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whack-a-mole/32/141_2.png) [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2022, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/38 "2022-08-07T01:27:31Z")
I do not know what legal order makes them retain records. I do know that many VPN providers operate in other countries and explicitly say they delete their records as a matter of course daily (or maybe more frequently than that). So, if a court says they have to preserve records they can justifiably say they have almost none since, as a matter of course, they delete their records on a regular basis. That is very, very different from the government which has record retention laws in place. Who is responsible for that record retention? Verizon? AT&T? T-Mobile? Can those agencies get away with an “oopsie…total accident that three agencies just all happened to do at the same time for the same thing” when they were required to preserve the record by law? ---
**Author:** ![md-2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@md-2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md-2000)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2022, 3:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/39 "2022-08-07T03:59:05Z")
Also as I understand, iMessage (iPhone to iPhone) is encrypted so allegedly Apple has no way to determine the contents; whereas SMS is plain text. (But how badly does the phone company need to keep old texts? Why keep them even a week? Is there a way that, if I delete my texts, I can get back what the phone company has from the last week?) > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > I’d put it more like checking out who all checked out the Anarchist’s Cookbook at the library. > > I’d venture to guess that there’s relevant case law in this general realm. More like - “Tell me everyone in the USA who checked out any book in any library or bought from a bookshop with ‘anarchist’ or ‘cookbook’ in the title”. The defense lawyer may lose on this one because apparently it’s very specific, search for the address of the house. I guess the question is, how likely is such a warrant to create false positives or ensnare innocent people? Could the fact that your name - among 150 others - get entered into a investigation database because you child googled something. Then maybe the feds - who have no details on the case other than your name is listed “under investigation” in Denver PD’s files for a hate crime - could deny you security clearance, putting you out of a job. This is the danger of casting a wide net for data when we’re talking about the justice system. ---
**Author:** ![si\_blakely](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@si\_blakely](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/si_blakely)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2022, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133/40 "2022-08-08T03:03:54Z")
> [@md-2000](#): > > But how badly does the phone company need to keep old texts? Why keep them even a week? Is there a way that, if I delete my texts, I can get back what the phone company has from the last week? No. Phone companies retain metadata (information about SMS messages) for some time, for their billing records. They only retain the SMS contents for as long as it takes to forward the message to it’s destination, in the case where the recipient phone is off the network. Even then, the message will expire if it is pending too long. > [@solost](#): > > some of the targeted actors were surprised because they thought they had deleted the photos awhile back. But no, they had just deleted the pics on their phone. They were still floating around in the cloud, just waiting for hackers to find them. More specifically, those photographs were stored in iCloud - a service provided by Apple to support iPhone users with in-the-cloud backups of photos and other media, as well as contact and device media. It is very clear on iPhones (and also on Android phones using a Google account in a similar way) that deleting media from off your device does not mean that it will not be retained on the backup service, and that complete deletion requires deleting them from the cloud service as well. > [@saje](#): > > But if someone maybe discussed or researched a plan to embezzle from their job, would that info be stored somewhere forever? If suspicions arose within a few months I can see how it might be retrievable, but after years? I can’t imagine how that could/would work. You are correct - the data will probably be gone. It is ephemeral, unless someone makes the time and effort to put mechanisms in place to retain it. I have SMS messages on my phone from a number of years ago, but I backed up and restored those messages as I upgraded my phone. GMail holds significant amounts of data, but even that is not limitless, and while deleted messages are initially archived, they do get deleted in time. People are often surprised because they do not realise that their phone has a backup mechanism and that they may be able to recover lost data, but they are just as surprised when they lose data because they did not avail themselves of such facilities, and their phone is lost or damaged. > [@DPRK](#): > > The NSA alone has billions of dollars worth of multiple data centres that can store and process multiple zettabytes of data. They also have the means of collecting this data (with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies such as AT&T). Much of the information that the NSA/GCHQ/etc collects for analysis is metadata (who called/emailed/messaged who), and not so much the content (unless they have a closer watch/intercept on an individual/group). The data interception capacity of the NSA does not begin to approach the data transport requirements of a telecommunications carrier, and the capacity of the links used for “Lawful Intercept” are almost certainly not backbone telecommunications network grade. The agencies will rely on the providers records rather than making their own. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/prompted-by-the-jones-case-is-all-digital-data-really-saved-and-retrievable-the-mind-boggles/969133.md?page=3)