TimeHop is a curious thing — it’s the purest form of the stupid internet faux nostalgia phenomenon. But it’s also a lot of mindless, sentimental fun, a snapshot of your (digital) life a year ago. Now it reads your texts.
The new feature doesn’t siphon your text messages away from your mobile carrier — rather, TimeHop sucks them straight off of your phone, using a method that’s eerily similar to government-grade forensic software. You actually have to plug in your phone, transfer all your texts over, and then wait for them to be uploaded to TimeHop. But don’t worry too much! There’s a decent privacy policy in place:
Your text messages remain 100% private unless you choose to share them. Your text message data is encryped and secured with bank level security. We collect your personal data to build a rich digital history experience that you love, not to sell it to third parties.
So all of those “ok be there in 1 min” dispatches will be in safe, encrypted hands.
Presumably, you’ll have to have abstained from deleting texts from a year ago for this to work at all, and who knows how interesting any of it will be. But sprinkling in this extra minutia will no doubt make the freeze dried vision of You a Year Ago a little more vivid. [TimeHop]