Tom Brady’s four-game suspension has angered many Patriots fans, who’ve since questioned the decision. The 20-page ruling by the NFL revealed that the quarterback had his cellphone destroyed, the very cellphone NFL investigators wanted to look at to see if Brady had ordered the footballs deflated.
Which raises the question: what are the best ways to destroy text messages forever?
Ben Levitan, an engineer who specializes in the design of cellphone networks, said: “Tom Brady should have come to me first.” Levitan outlined some tips on the best ways to delete text messages for good, should you ever need to.
Use a magnet
It’s simple, quick and could potentially be claimed as an accident. Just like how a credit card can be wiped when you put a magnet to it, a phone has a similar reaction. Put a strong magnet on your phone and “it will just completely destroy the memory of your phone”, said Levitan.
Use a text message shredder
To effectively get rid of text messages, one has to overwrite them in the memory space. “It physically writes garbage into every single memory space on your phone so it can’t be recovered,” Levitan said.
Good old-fashioned smashing
If you destroy the chip, the memory will be lost. But this option is tricky. You have to be thorough in your smashing so that the chip is completely destroyed. “If you’re just destroying the keyboard and battery that’s not going to be sufficient,” Levitan said. Smashing one’s phone is also the most conspicuous of the options.
It’s important to note that the above options are only effective if they are used on both the sender’s and the recipient(s)’ phones. The text messages are stored in both locations.
Some phone companies also keep records of sent text messages. They sit on the company’s server for anywhere from three days to three months, depending on the company’s policy. Verizon holds texts for up to five days and Virgin Mobile keeps them for 90 days. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint do not keep the contents of text messages. Once that time period has expired, the company deletes the content of the messages but holds on to the time and date of the text and who it was sent to.
To avoid this problem, you can make use of iMessage, a form of communication between two iPhones. iMessages are not stored on phone companies’ servers.
Things not to do
Do not simply delete text messages from your phone. Text messages will be stored even after that. Your phone has limited space but it can still store approximately 1,000 text messages. It completely deletes old text messages after some time, but for the infrequent texter, messages from years and years ago could still be stored away.
Do not throw your phone in water. Generally, it doesn’t delete all of the information from your phone. When a phone hits water, it usually shorts out the battery and kills the power. But if someone were to dry it out for a couple of days and pop in a new battery, it could work again just fine.
