SAN ANTONIO – A cybersecurity professor at the University of the Incarnate Word says anything shared in the digital world, including your texts, is vulnerable to being shared publicly.
Just this week, sexually explicit text messages were revealed between Congressman Tony Gonzales and his staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, who died last year by suicide.
The staffer’s husband, Adrian Aviles, provided the texts to KSAT following a forensic examination of her phone, which he says supports claims of an affair between the two.
How private are your messages?
Dr. Gonzalo Parra, an assistant cybersecurity professor at the University of the Incarnate Word, explained how private texts are.
“If I were to send you a text message, who could see that?” asked KSAT’s Daniela Ibarra.
“That would be ideally only you, and anyone who has access to your phone,” Parra responded.
Parra explained that people may have already agreed to share their information with companies by granting permissions or not reading the terms and conditions.
“Just with that simple route, you’ll expose that information to another party that -- they shouldn’t have the need to see that information from the user,” he said.
How to protect your messages
According to Apple, iMessage is end-to-end encrypted between Apple devices, meaning that only the sender and recipients can access them.
On Google Messages, end-to-end encryption is available when both users are on the app and have rich communication services (RCS) chats enabled.
Parra showed KSAT how to protect messages on WhatsApp, which anyone can download. It encrypts messages within the app.
“Let’s get started with disappearing messages,” he said. “This increases your privacy and can improve storage on your device.”
Users can set a timer to have texts self-delete for everyone, but it doesn’t stop someone from sharing the messages, including screenshots.
“Anything that goes to the digital world has a level of vulnerability that it could eventually be exposed in one way or another,” Parra said. “...so be careful with what you write. Be careful with anything that you expose in social networks, that you expose via message. That’s pretty much the basic guideline.”
Read more reporting on the KSAT Investigates page.