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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months, unless you apply labels or are on a litigation hold (which would make such policy completely illegal). The email policy has no other purpose than to limit legal exposure. There is no legitimate business reason for that policy. In fact, it actively harms institutional memory and is frankly Orwellian, IMHO.

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That's not just Google though. Most companies have an email deletion policy that auto-deletes emails after a certain about of time, on the premise that they eventually lose all value and only pose a potential liability and litigation risk.

Even U.S. government officials have used private email servers to avoid having to serve them up via requests.

> Even U.S. government officials have used private email servers to avoid having to serve them up via requests.

And when that failed they destroyed the hard drive that contained the exchange server db. (See IRS scandal)

> The email policy has no other purpose than to limit legal exposure.

> There is no legitimate business reason for that policy.

So the policy is about limiting the chance of potentially very expensive lawsuits, and has no legitimate business reason? Choose one.

I wish people stopped overusing "Orwellian": the term is so overused that you could use it next to "agile" and I wouldn't notice.

> I wish people stopped overusing "Orwellian"

"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past, including the "unperson"—a person whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, practiced by modern repressive governments. Often, this includes the circumstances depicted in his novels, particularly Nineteen Eighty-Four[2] but political doublespeak is criticized throughout his work, such as in Politics and the English Language.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

I defend my use of the term. Disappearing the past absolutely is Orwellian. Down the memory hole!

"Orwellian" seems like a good fit for memory-holing people's communications.

At the same time the only apps I cannot select & copy any text from are YouTube and GoogleMaps. The comments people leave there are so valuable for Google?

I just tried it, I seem to be able to copy text just fine from both apps.

Maybe it's because you tried iOS apps? It doesn't work in Android apps.

I misspoke. I meant I can copy & paste on the web. On iOS I can copy paste from Google maps, but not Youtube. Maybe there just isn't a good enough use case for it, that's why it's not supported everywhere?

> They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-deleted after 18 months

Eric Schmidt’s retention policy was 72 hours.

Before or after the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Settlement?

How does he keep track of relationship history with someone? Commitments? Goals?

If true, my guess is that with such a huge power imbalance Schmidt isn't often waiting 72 hours for replies.

Source? Curious what the reasoning would be there. Seems insanely impractical

It's obviously false, there are a number of regulations which would require G. to keep his communications on record for years, which is really established and well understood despite the commons here seeming to disagree with me.

More than likely Schmidt may have said something along the lines of deleting anything more than 3 days old because at the pace of his business, it's 'time out' and not relevant. But that's just a matter of his peculiar communications style. That the label has changed to 'archive' doesn't mean anything really from a corporate perceptive.

So yes, illegal to actually delete, and seemingly impractical to bump from one's inbox, but perhaps at 'Google Speed' there's some reason for it (and maybe there's a big caveat i.e. anything that's 'starred' or whatever doesn't get deleted, or, maybe anything older than 3 days that's opened or unopened gets deleted).

I doubt that because it's probably illegal. Execs have to keep copies of things they write around.

EDIT: For those who are wondering, here is a quick summary [1].

Eric Schmidt's emails are definitely kept around a very long time, for very legal reasons, and whatever he happens to do with his own personal 'inbox' is not relevant to the subject at hand, and amounts to a kind of personal email/habit choice.

To suggest '72 hours' in response to a discussion about legal discovery etc. is basically misleading in that regard.

[1] https://www.spamtitan.com/web-filtering/email-retention-laws...

Execs themselves don’t, they just have to be kept around. The policies are most likely enforced through Gmail’s retention settings which are set by IT, who can view all of the mail (regardless of whether it was deleted from the user’s mailbox) in Vault.

Yes, of course, 'execs' don't manage anything on their own, but the OP is talking about 'email retention' in the context of litigation and discovery i.e. 'a copy' irrespective of label, which is a legal requirement.

Eric Schmidt is not deleting his emails after 72 hours for the reason you mentioned and certainly the company is not, which is the salient issue.

One could say 'oh that's just from his inbox' but that's pointless in the context of this conversation because we're talking about 'If the corporation has a copy or not' i.e. 'IT' etc..

Scmidt deleting maybe a local copy after 72 hours doesn't really have anything to do with anything other than his personal email habits.

[1] https://www.spamtitan.com/web-filtering/email-retention-laws...

This policy makes very little sense. Does Google IT also purge every message he responded to from all corporate managed mailboxes?

I work at Google and my messages are purged before I even send them. This avoids so many problems!

Truly Google lives in the future the rest of us will catch up with.

How is it Orwellian?

>"Orwellian" is an adjective describing a situation, idea, or societal condition that George Orwell identified as being destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past, including the "unperson"—a person whose past existence is expunged from the public record and memory, practiced by modern repressive governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

Stop overusing terms you don't understand

The analysis here is so absolutist and extremist it is ridiculous.

Many business have auto-delete for the simple business purpose - when someone hacks your email (which will happen somewhere in a large business) - why do you need to keep all that crap around forever? And yes, people email payroll details, passwords, logins and the list goes on - stop with the preaching about how to email securely.

So you auto-delete, which reduces the blast radius. In most cases folks are not looking at emails past 3 years old.

>There is no legitimate business reason for that policy.

You already completely answered the perfectly standard and reasonable business reason: "to limit legal exposure. "

In fact, this legitimate business reason is 100% the reason for the policy. Increasing legal exposure for no reason is a bad idea, for companies and for individuals.

This is a pretty standard policy at larger companies. Part of the reason is that even if everything in the emails is 100% legally fine, discovery is _expensive_ and gets more expensive the more emails exist.

This explanation was given to me by a corporate lawyer who was trying to figure out whether the same kind of expiration could be put on tickets in bug and project trackers, which would have been even more harmful to institutional memory than an email expiration policy.

You get more of the behaviors you encourage and less of the ones you discourage. The US legal system strongly discourages retaining email, since it rarely works in favor of the entity making the retention decision. And there is no particular reason to keep emails that old, so naturally companies want to get rid of them.

Almost every US corporation with a competent legal department has such a policy, and at a lot of them the period is way shorter than 18 months. I've suffered through 30 day policies before, and it's dumb and not fun at all, but Google is hardly being creative on this point.

So that's what they settled on? Kent tried to introduce it while I was still there and the pushback was so severe they decided not to do it at the time. I think the initially proposed retention period was shorter than that though. I could live with 18 months, but shorter than that cuts into all sorts of business processes including the all-important performance review cycle (AKA "perf"). I do think it's detrimental to the business of writing software though. I quite often search for emails from years and years ago, as well as mail "notes to self" to be able to find them later.

I disagree. If its part of the institutional memory it should be documented on an internal site and kept. Not stuck in an email format to disappear.

Personally, I often refer back to emails of what people sent me in order to have proper context, both technical, logistical, etc. Instructions on how to do things, how we debugged something or other, etc. That makes me more productive and useful as well as other people. If we gotta write every email over again and put it up on a wiki, that just won't happen.

Write it on the wiki first then just email the link to the wiki. No additional effort and then the guy who joins two years after everyone on the email chain has left and now has to maintain it also has that info.

I meant specifically, things like "Wait, who is this person? What did they want again? What did I tell them last time?" That's not stuff you put on a wiki.

This may or may not work for you, but I keep notes in a collection of Google docs.

Depending on context, these are either shared with the other person (and usually editable by them) or is accessible only by me.

At the volume of mail I was receiving at Google (100+/day), there's just no time to manually index things like that. Why can't we let email archives just function?

If you need it for your workflow, it is very easy to avoid the auto-deletes. I know plenty of people who blanket keep all their old emails without a problem.

> The email policy has no other purpose

Yes, it has: GDPR requires that you delete PII in reasonable time. I have a lot of customers contacting me by email for example, but also the JIRA notifications which all end up in emails with extensive PII. It must be deleted in a controlled way according to GDPR.

But you are correct that this excuse goes away with Google, since they don’t do support ;)

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