DNA Special: Are your private chats really that private?

Just like the soul lives on even after death, in today's era, our private data is not private at all, and as much as we think that that our private conversations are our own, they aren't. Even if our phones gets destroyed, broken our burnt, the data lives on in the 'internet of things'.

The same is happening with the big celebrities of Bollywood who are accused of the drugs link. The private Whatsapp chats of these big film stars are now in front of the world. But it can happen to any of us and all our secrets can come tumbling out in the open. So, today we are going to analyse how safe is our data despite claims from technology companies and how we can make it more secure.

First let us talk about WhatsApp which has as many as 40 crore users in India. We will tell you how to make your chats more secure on WhatsApp:

First of all, do not take screenshots of your chats. Whatsapp's Chats End To End... Are encrypted. That means no one can read it other than the two persons who exchanged Masseges. Not even Whatsapp. But when you take a Screen Shot of your conversation, these Screen Shot you save in a mobile phone and in case your phone is stolen or if you don't have a password in a mobile phone, these Chats can take someone else's hand.

Secondly, as far as possible, don't store your WhatsApp's back-up data in Cloud Storage or mobile phone's local storage. If you use Android phones, you may have noticed that... Whatsapp prepares a Back up of your DATA at 2 am every night and it stays safe for 10 days in the back-up memory of mobile phones. The DATA of people who use Iphone also gets store on I Cloud. But on Cloud or mobile phone storage, the data wouldn't be encrypted.

In addition, different mobile applications also ask you for a variety of non-essential permissions and your location and other information can be easily traced when you give these permissions to these applications. Some applications are also able to listen to your conversations and draw pictures without your permission.

Now the question is, how did the Whatsapp chats of Bollywood stars get leaked? According to cyber experts, these are two possible ways. Firstly, if these people did not delete their chats, their mobile phones may have been cloned and through this all these the Narcotics Control Bureau accessed their chats. The other possibility is that these people may have deleted their Whatsapp Chats, didn't delete the back-up data.

By adopting some simple methods, you can definitely keep the data on your computer, mobile phone somewhat safe:

1) Stop of taking screenshots of your WhatsApp chats.

2) Stop taking Automatic Backup of your Data on Cloud Storage. If you use an Iphone, go to Setting - I Cloud to see which apps have automatic backup. Turn off the automatic back-up.

3) If you use an Android phone, first go to Google Drive then open Settings Menu on the left. This will show you an Option of Back Ups. Click on whichever App you want to make, including Whatsapp, secure. On the right you'll see two Options. The first option is to delete Backup and the second to turn off Automatic Back Up. You can choose any of these options. But before you do this, you must see that you are not doing any important data. Because when your mobile phone is damaged or stolen, you can get your data back from the same Cloud Storage. In addition, Whatsapp's Backup is also a stored on the mobile phone's local storage. Open the mobile phone's file manager to delete it. Then find Wshatsapp folder in it. Click on the Data Base File in it and delete this file.

But even after doing so, the data from your mobile phone is not completely deleted. A hacker, a criminal or an investigative agency can get your data from your mobile phone's flash memory. To avoid this, you can download shredder apps from Android's Play Store or Apple's App Store. Using them completely deletes files on your mobile phone or server and makes it almost impossible to recover them.

The impact of leaking chats on WhatsApp has been that people have started WhatsApp and have now started using apps like Telegram and Signal. Telegram is considered to be more secure than Whatsapp. Between September 19 and 24, the number of those installing Telegram has increased by 64 per cent. In the meantime, about 20 lakh new people have downloaded Telegram.

So, the crux of the matter is that we should be careful with our personal chats as online safety and security can't be guaranteed by any company and we shouldn't become slaves to the digital world.