Mar 12, 2008 12:00 am US/Eastern
What Happens To Text Messages After You Send Them?
BOSTON (WBZ) ―
It was a trail of text messages that helped lead investigators to New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer.
So that makes one wonder what happens to a text message after you send it?
When you hit send it goes to your cell phone service provider and then to your friend, but that text has a shelf life that can be accessed.
Experts say text messages stick around about 14 days before they are gone.
Here's why. Emails are almost always stored and saved somewhere, but text messages are not because of the volume.
Consider this, for every one email there are not hundreds but thousands of texts. Worldwide, nearly 2 billion people text every day. Carriers say they can only serve as a delivery service and not a storage facility; they don't have the room.
So, if two billion people send text messages every day, how much does that add up to? We checked and best estimates are about a trillion messages a day.
As for privacy, phone providers say they take it very seriously, but with a court order text messages can be intercepted. That's exactly what happened in the Spitzer case.
Carriers say it's a complicated process that takes time, and remember 14 days and poof those messages are gone.
People we talked to said they're always concerned with privacy when it comes to testing.
"I speak in code because I'm worried about my privacy," said one college aged man we spoke to.
While a young lady had this to say when we asked her about texting and privacy: "Absolutely some things I wouldn't want my grandmother reading how's that?"
She admitted to us that "perhaps" she did send some racy messages from time to time and then told us that needless to say privacy is "very important when it comes to text messages" because "You don't know where these things are going."
(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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