Help privacy post ctb?

[Devil's Adcovate]

i know its silly, but one of my largest concerns is the police and my family snooping through my devices after i'm gone
pictures, messages, accounts, you know the deal
my phone uses google photos for pictures and they're all backed up to a separate account; if i delete all on both, does that guarantee no pictures will be found? would there be an easy way to recover them?
is there a way to secure my accounts without deleting the source? for example, i wouldn't mind keeping my spotify account open, but i would hate for the account info to be traceable to anything else
if i delete my discord account, will messages and servers still be traceable?
how hard is it to get rid of a digital footprint? would i have to worry about things being found even if i delete them?
sorry that these questions are so stupid, i'm not very tech savvy, but any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[pharmacoepia]

I'm a huge autodidact when it comes to CS and cryptography, so I can help you. (I'm a big autodidact in general for a lot of subjects!)

I don't know your jurisdiction, but most jurisdictions rule that intentionally deleting your accounts or search history and data is not destruction of evidence as it implies that somebody had information that was deeply personal to them. It would be analogous to destroying your diary in the laws eyes. However, that does not mean you are safe for the data you put publicly, it just means that they can't coerce you to tell you what you have deleted. They can only get a warrant for what you have available.

It's very hard to get rid of a digital footprint if you talk your mouth on forums, unless you keep your IRL life and online life completely separate. If your Spotify accounts have any mentions of your other social medias, or you have linked your Spotify account on different sites on the internet, then thats a path that LE can take.

If you live in the EU, you may be eligible for GDPR protections. This was a law passed by the EU that allows every single piece of data from an EU customer to a website to be deleted. Most social media sites are forced to comply with this law if they are to operate in the EU. Facebook was given a lot of shit from the EU and billions of dollars in fines to the customers rights they violated by not deleting EU customer data after specifically requested, so it does work.

 

[Praestat_Mori]

Well, questions are never stupid! First of all it's hard or almost impossible to get rid of any publicly posted social media content. But I think you never posted any real personal content publicly and nobody else knows your nickname and email you used to register here on SS. If nobody else out there knows your email-addresses you registered at certain social networks / clouds / any other services it will be very difficult to recover passwords.

If you use conventional hard drives (HDD) you might want to use DBAN (darik's boot and nuke) to format them in a way it is impossible to ever recover any data that was once saved on them. For SSD there should be different methods available.

I personally would delete relevant photos/documents/mails and so on stored in the cloud early enough, when this data is removed from the cloud it can't be restored easily forever.

Use private browsers such as "epic browser" to visit sites you don't want anyone else to know you ever visited them from your devices, such browser don't keep any track records, nor browsing histories.

 

[Das Nichts]

All my hard drives are encrypted and I will wipe my phone before ctb.

I don't have any social accounts. As for your cloud backups: delete anything and remove it from the recycle bin.

If nobody has your passwords I don't think any reputable large provider will hand out your account info to anybody else.

 

[Praestat_Mori]

If nobody has your passwords I don't think any reputable large provider will hand out your account info to anybody else.

If anyone knows the email-address and they have access to the emails, they can very easily request a new password, without even contacting the provider.

 

[Das Nichts]

If anyone knows the email-address and they have access to the emails, they can very easily request a new password, without even contacting the provider.

True. But I would assume everyone concerned about this would not have their email account set up on random third party devices.