Are SMS Messages secure and private?
A friend of mine recently told me that SMS messages are available to the public and law-enforcement. Does anyone know if this is true?
iPhone XR
Question marked as
SMS are not available to "the public". Whether or not they are available to law enforcement is a bit more complicated. Could a law enforcement agency get a subpoena to access your messages? Yes but what they could get might vary. Most carriers don't keep the actual message content for very long so, generally, what law enforcement would get would be the times and phone numbers. Can they get a warrant to tap your texts so that they could get them as they are sent and received? Probably but, you'd have to be under suspicion of something before that would happen.
SMS is a carrier function, by the way. They would be the ones served with any legal documents.
