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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

This is Uber, who designed systems for remotely wiping entire offices when they thought that the data might be called for by the authorities.

Perhaps there will be unexpected 'issues' meaning that such data will have been lost in this case.

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I can guarantee you (at least one) other major tech companies have the same system in place. Companies that operate in multiple jurisdictions don’t want all of their assets compromised because of a raid in one city/state/country.

E.g. Brazil was at odds with WhatsApp over their message encryption — Brazil wanted WhatsApp to stop encrypting messages so that it would be possible to subpoena chat logs. If Brazilian police raided a hypothetical WhatsApp Brazil office, would it not be prudent for Facebook to cut off data access from that office? Especially given that the nature of technology means that once police have an employee’s laptop and can compel them to enter their password, they have access to essentially all of the company’s data worldwide.

That kind of thing might fly in some arenas, but judges have literally no sense of humor when evidence is “lost” in a criminal case, or civil wrongful death suit. That’s more or less a quick way to lose in the worst possible way.

Judge - you don't understand - the office that's responsible for this remote deletio^w securing of data is in another jurisdiction (Canada!). So Uber USA is absolved[1].

1. Uber really had a tool that did this IRL: https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/11/16878284/uber-secret-tool...

As I said, context matters. In the context of a death, this kind of thing is doom. When someone is killed, there is also a lot of cooperation across jurisdictions.

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