Just Deleting a Text on Your Phone

When you save or send photos, videos, texts and other digital messages on your devices,

that data is extremely difficult to remove, even if you delete it from your phone or computer.  

Nicolas Tucat/AFP via Getty Images

Texts and other electronic messages from the U.S. Secret Service have become a point a controversy after the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general told Congress that those records were deleted after his office had requested them. But can a text or other digital messages ever truly be erased from existence?

People delete text messages and other electronic messages for many reasons: to free up room on their device; to break contact after a sour conversation; and, from time to time, to wipe out a conversation, for one reason or another.

But deleting a digital correspondence isn't as easy as you might think. For starters, depending on the program you're using, the recipient still has a copy of the message you sent them. And that data might live on in cloud storage.

Alfred Demirjian, founder and CEO of TechFusion, has spent the past 35 years in digital forensics and data recovery in Boston. He said that once you hit send, that information will likely exist forever, especially if the government wants whatever you've sent.  READ MORE...