"Encrypted chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp are one of the best ways to keep your digital conversations as private as possible. But if you’re not careful with how those conversations are backed up, you can accidentally undermine your privacy.

When a conversation is properly encrypted end-to-end, it means that the contents of those messages are only viewable by the sender and the recipient. The organization that runs the messaging platform—such as Meta or Signal—does not have access to the contents of the messages. But it does have access to some metadata, like the who, where, and when of a message. Companies have different retention policies around whether they hold onto that information after the message is sent.

What happens after the messages are sent and received is entirely up to the sender and receiver. If you’re having a conversation with someone, you may choose to screenshot that conversation and save that screenshot to your computer’s desktop or phone’s camera roll. You might choose to back up your chat history, either to your personal computer or maybe even to cloud storage (services like Google Drive or iCloud, or to servers run by the application developer)."