Ephemerality Is a Lie

On the internet, as with most of life, you can’t count on things lasting forever. Websites close down, servers get turned off, the wrong button gets hit and years of work is erased. But just as you can’t depend on anything persisting, you can’t count on everything disappearing, either. Those photos of you looking ridiculous in college, which your friends uploaded to Facebook? Even if you delete your account, they’ll linger. From old blog posts to comments left on forums to tweets, things have a way of stubbornly persisting on the internet. It’s hard to predict what will disappear and what will last, but that persistence is partially why some sites and services have baked in disappearance as a feature.

Intentional ephemerality, the kind first popularized by Snapchat in 2011, is a sort of antidote to the digital hoarding that characterized the first 30 years of the Internet. The assurance of a digital expiration date is freeing. Why worry so much about what you say when you know it will disappear soon anyway?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted all these positive qualities of what he called “reducing permanence” online last week, announcing in a Facebook post that they would be at the core of a new “privacy-focused” platform he plans to build. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever,” he wrote.

In his post, Zuckerberg laid out the promise of ephemerality as a way to make people feel more comfortable sharing online, but it’s not an ironclad strategy. “Ephemerality is a mixed bag,” says Gus Rossi, global policy director at the nonprofit Public Knowledge, which advocates for an open internet. Though Rossi believes it’s generally good that not everything stay online forever, he also notes that ephemerality can make people feel more secure or private than they actually are. “The risk is that you delete something that could be inconvenient or embarrassing for you in the future, and someone took a screenshot of it," he says. "Then it’s going to be around anyway.”

Even the most encrypted messaging services are only as secure as the person receiving the message. Plenty of people have sent messages they believed to be ephemeral only to find out later that wasn’t the case, whether due to the platform’s data management or their own mistakes. Guaranteed ephemerality—where something disappears forever, leaving no trace—is a lie.

Privacy researcher and former United States Digital Service engineer Kathy Pham emphasizes that ephemerality requires careful system design. Often, she notes, the reason for data permanence is not that companies even want the data around forever, but rather they just have “lazy data practices.” Early on, security problems with Snapchat’s API allowed unauthorized third-party apps to plug into the service and undermine its promise of instant deletion. When a hacker got into one of those third-party apps in 2014, hundreds of thousands of photos and videos were posted online in an event dubbed the Snappening. After that attack, Snapchat began actively designing against third-party intrusions.

Users of ephemeral and encrypted messaging apps also need to keep careful track of their privacy settings and other ways they can leave unintentional digital traces—things that are not always obvious at first glance. Former Trump campaign chair and convicted fraudster Paul Manafort reminded the world of that last year when special counsel Robert Mueller accused him of witness tampering via, among other things, WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging app. Though his original messages were fully encrypted, Manafort failed to turn off a setting that automatically backs up messages to iCloud, where they were not—and where the FBI eventually obtained them.

Settings like the one Manafort missed are not always clear, nor are companies always transparent about what is ephemeral by default and what isn’t. On Instagram, for instance, the default is for your Stories to remain privately available to you in an archive, so that you can choose to “highlight” them on your profile. You can turn that setting off if you go digging, and then Stories “expire” completely after 24 hours. “That gives people the comfort to share more naturally,” Zuckerberg writes in his post. “This philosophy could be extended to all private content.”

But it’s not clear if doing so deletes the Stories from Instagram’s backend, or just from you. “He talks about limiting the amount of time they store metadata on messages,” Pham said in an email, about Zuckerberg’s recent post. “But when it comes to the rest of the profile, he talks about expiring and archiving, but it is unclear if that's only on the frontend, [which makes] you feel good because you don't easily see it anymore, or if they actually remove all the data from all their systems.”

In an interview with WIRED after his announcement, Zuckerberg said many aspects of Facebook’s future service still need to be worked out. “This isn't a product announcement,” he said. “It’s a statement of the principles that we think are necessary to build this privacy-focused social platform.”

But nothing a company can do—not encryption nor an automatic expiration—can control what other people do with your message once you send it. The FBI got Manafort’s iCloud backups after witnesses saved the messages and turned them over to the government. Even a secure app like Signal, which doesn't back up message history to iCloud, can’t guarantee that a recipient won’t take a photo or screenshot and share it with someone else.

Snapchat has a feature that alerts you if someone takes a screenshot, but Instagram and Facebook Stories don’t. On both those services, viewers can easily take a screenshot of whatever you share without your knowledge, and do whatever they want with it—sometimes to cruel effect. One Zero reported last week that kids at some schools are posting on their Insta Stories asking people to use the slider emoji tool to guess how much the poster likes them. When someone answers, the poster then screenshots their response and posts it, while making clear they actually like them far less.

And of course, an ephemeral post can have an impact long after it’s taken down. Former Trump adviser and Nixon enthusiast Roger Stone, who has been charged in connection with Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, learned that lesson the hard way last week. He posted to his Instagram Stories a photo of himself along with the words “Who framed Roger Stone,” only to find that a few days later, lawyers for Mueller’s office sent a screenshot and description of said post to the judge in Stone’s case. The post might be in violation of a gag order the judge had previously issue against him.

All of these problems point to the large one: that ephemerality itself can lull people into a false sense of security. But you have to remember that just because you can’t see something online anymore doesn’t mean it hasn’t left a mark—on an algorithm, for instance—or been copied and saved elsewhere.

And when ephemerality does work, it can cause its own sorts of problems. Historians compiling records of this age will be unable to include most private messages and disappearing Snapchats. Some people may regret not keeping a record of what they share ephemerally. I post most photos of my son to my Instagram Stories without the option to archive turned on, as a nod at protecting his privacy. One day I may wish I still had all those curated moments.

The question of whether government officials should even be able to use encrypted or ephemeral messaging is a legally fraught one. Deleting the words of government officials may violate public records requirements. “It raises First Amendment concerns,” says Rossi. “What happens if you are a public figure. Do you have the right to delete your Twitter feed, or is that a public record?” The Department of Justice has said that Trump’s tweets are “official statements of the president,” which raises the question for some legal scholars of whether it’s ever legal for the president to delete his tweets. Furthermore, you don’t have to be a government figure for this kind of thing to matter; anyone involved in a legal case may find themselves in hot water if they delete social media posts that could be pertinent to their case. That could apply to things like Instagram Stories.

All of these issues are things Zuckerberg must think about if he actually ends up designing an ephemeral Facebook. Whether he does or not, the most important thing you can remember is that there's only one sure way to not have something come back to haunt you on the internet: Don't post it in the first place. Ephemerality won't save you from poor judgment.