How Much Digital Privacy Do You Really Have?

Dec. 10, 2009— -- Parry Aftab, a privacy and Internet safety lawyer, answered "Good Morning America " viewers' questions about digital privacy.From e-mails to texts and instant messages Aftab explains why your personal correspondence may not remain private.

Question: Are the chat conversations on Facebook recorded somewhere, like the texts are on your cellular phone?

Parry Aftab's Answer: Facebook has a cell phone application that allows you to converse on Facebook on your cell phone. If you use that the application will store those communications on your cell phone.

If you are doing it from your computer, then Facebook stores those communications, and it depends on what kind of communications they are as to how long they hold them.

I am on the Facebook advisory board, and people need to understand that there are always three people on every conversation on Facebook; you, the person you are talking to and the Facebook server. If you delete your end of the conversation, there are still two copies: the Facebook server until Facebook deletes and the person you are talking to. So you need to understand that a simple deletion will only delete one piece of it.

Think of it as making photocopies, every time someone else is involved in the conversation there is a photocopy. To complicate things further if you are using a work computer, then the network server at work will back up your communication. So even if your part of the conversation is done and you delete it on your computer, the other person deletes it from his or her Facebook page and it is past the time that Facebook keeps its data, your boss may have a backup on the server.