Unlike years prior to Patriot Act, BSA, and DMCA, both criminal and civil agencies seem to operate assuming anything on citizens' cell phones or computers will eventually be discoverable, if not somehow prosecutable. These forces are much larger than us and there's little way we can protect ourselves from their creepiness.
In the face of this, we'd prefer to delete all of our data every day but our lives would be even more negatively impacted by these forces if we do. We'd lose track of birthdays, anniversaries, important receipts, and so forth. So we still need to retain some data for our daily affairs in these absurd times.
Understanding that protecting data is impossible for less than a team of experts, what can we individuals do to retain some data, and somewhat mitigate its exposure? If we can do some selective capture, we might be able to maintain our activities without gov't and info-agency stalkers into 100% of our private affairs. Texts are possibly a good test-case.
- application my two primary considerations are 1) include all conversations in a single back-up, 2) have a clear text, non-propietary format. There was a great app, "Email My Texts" which collated a selected period of texts into TXT and included attachment file-names. Google mysteriously removed this app from the PlayStore. It seemed like a killer app that customers were choosing over all alternative$, and maybe Google disapproved, not sure. The remaining apps have awkward formats which parse conversations or use proprietary XTML, PDF's (immensely inefficient), and so on. The best option I've found of the remaining PlayStore apps in 2020 is... ... which is worthy of upgrading to Pro, for something like $4.
- format CSV the only option in text apps 2020. If a TXT app returns that can select all conversations in a single file and names the attachment, I'd take it over CSV, but that's 2020 for you.
- storage run rclone to encrypt CSV files to cloud storage. I cover this thoroughly in next month's rclone post. Meanwhile...
$ rclone listservers
- searching obviously, the reason to back-up texts is the same reason to back-up emails. You might need some information downstream. How can we search encrypted CSV files in such a way that we can easily find keywords, and then print all the date and parties to the interaction? Not easily. Perhaps a Python script which displays the results in a browser, sequentially as it processes a CSV file.
storage
Assuming this is encrypted via Watch these videos first...
1. Rclone basics (8:30) Tyler, 2017.
2. Rclone encrypted (10:21) Tyler, 2017.
...which can be followed verbatim. There are some new details since these videos, discussed in one of my other blog entries, but the core of the setup is the same. Additionally, this video (8:19, 2017) has some good basic commands.
search
In order to find information in a haystack of encrypted CSV files, each file must be decypted and greped individually. Since we have many encrypted CSV files, this is unlikely to be efficient. It's probably worthwhile to have a passle of encrypted CSV files on the Cloud, and then a local backup for parsing with one's Python script.
emails
A second question arises from text retention which is how to save emails which we want and to encrypt these. How to display them?
