Deleting texts to save space, Ursula? ‘It’s not the 1990s.’

BRUSSELS — The president of the European Commission auto-deletes messages from her phone in part to save storage space, the EU executive said this week.

Tech experts have but one question: Really?

Deleting messages to save space “sounds cute but also hard to believe. Let’s not be silly here, it’s not the 1990s,” said Lukasz Olejnik, senior research fellow at King’s College London and a cybersecurity expert.

“A text message barely takes any room on a modern phone. Like, you would need to get hundreds of thousands of text messages for it to actually make a difference,” Belgian ethical hacker Inti De Ceukelaire said, calling the Commission’s explanation “a non-argument.”

“Why doesn’t she change to a phone with more storage?” asked Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for data and analytics at technology market research firm IDC in Europe.

Ursula von der Leyen is in the hot seat over a text message she received from French President Emmanuel Macron last year urging her to block the EU-Mercosur trade deal, as first reported by POLITICO. The message was subsequently deleted from von der Leyen’s phone, the Commission said in response to an access to documents request filed by Follow the Money reporter Alexander Fanta.

On Wednesday Commission spokesperson Olof Gill told reporters: “The messages are auto-deleted after a while, just for space reasons.” He jokingly added: “Otherwise, the phone would go on fire.”

Another spokesperson, Balazs Ujvari, added it also helped prevent security breaches, but doubled down on the idea that it was a means of saving space: “On the one hand, it reduces the risk of leaks and security breaches, which is of course an important factor … And also, it’s a question of space on the phone, so, effective use of a mobile device.”

To be sure, many Europeans have struggled with overloaded phone storage. But for most it’s a matter of home videos and reams of family pictures that are clogging devices.

“Messages take up a lot of space if we are talking about videos, voice recordings,” IDC’s Jeronimo said, whereas text-based messages “take nearly nothing from the storage.”

The Commission told its staff in 2020 to start using Signal, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, in a push to increase the security of its communications. The institution recommended using the app’s disappearing messages functionality in a 2022 guidance called “Checklist to Make Your Signal Safer.”

For security purposes it makes sense, Jeronimo said. “If someone like [von der Leyen] loses her phone, or if the phone is hacked … there’s a very high risk” that her communications will be compromised.

But the Macron text again trains the spotlight on the EU executive’s policies regarding keeping a public record of its leader’s communications, following a scandal dubbed “Pfizergate” in which von der Leyen’s text exchanges with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla over Covid vaccine contracts were never archived.

The European Ombudsman continues to investigate Pfizergate, and this week announced it had opened an investigation into last year’s text from Macron.

According to Olejnik, “the truth is that [auto-deleting messages] is great for security, not so [much] for public transparency or accountability.”

Gerardo Fortuna contributed reporting.