Facebook tells employees to preserve all communications for legal reasons | Hacker News Reader

Facebook tells employees to preserve all communications for legal reasons

nytimes.com

"stay away from ephemeral messaging for work purposes" is the part I found interesting.

First, does Workplace chat (including video chat) count as ephemeral messaging? Or IRC? Because those are how most work gets done there. Remember that big outage a few weeks ago? One of the reasons it took so long to fix is that normal lines of communication were cut. If this edict were rigorously followed, this would cripple operations (especially involving remote workers which I suspect is the real point).

Second, speech is a form of ephemeral messaging but I doubt they mean to discourage that. In fact, normal practice at companies worried about legal action is to encourage non-recorded communication. If they discourage one form of communication because it doesn't leave a record, but say nothing either way about another form of communication that also doesn't leave a record, they've achieved nothing at all.

I'm not technically savvy, but I assumed my organisation retained all emails on the server even if I deleted them on my machine. I don't send anything by email that I wouldn't write on headed notepaper.

It depends on your email provider, the settings enabled by the postmaster/email admin and how much storage space they allocated/paid for. By default if you delete your emails, most mail servers will either immediately delete the emails or will queue for deletion meaning based on retention policy and/or available space. To preserve emails usually requires enabling legal hold that forces a copy of the email into an archive that has a retention policy on it. Some mail servers call it lawful intercept. Each email provider and application handles this a little differently. Your org if they are transparent could tell you what the current settings are for your org and if your account is being monitored.

I've had this enabled on my account due to a former employee threatening employees and naming me. It caused grief for the IT folks as it would fill up all their space. My account was one of the oldest and received emails from many ISP's, vendors and old monitoring tools.

Corporate email is normally retained for as long as is feasible (think years to decades), with rules very different from consumer email (which operates more or less as you describe).

Yeah it depends heavily on the size of the org and how much they are willing to spend. For a large corporation this is common in fintech and government but rare otherwise due to the spend. But you are right some orgs are willing to make that spend. I've seen smaller corporations set retention to a year to meet some compliance requirement. Some orgs will even buy vaulting appliances that will protect the data in multiple locations and requires multiple appointed executives to "turn the key" to override a retention policy.

> I'm not technically savvy

I’m genuinely curious how you ended up here?

I predict employees will increasingly make phone calls instead of sending an email.

That's already policy at many tech firms. If in any doubt that your communications might be worth later scrutiny, don't commit it to a written medium... (at least without CC'ing in legal counsel)

I send emails sometimes just to leave a paper trail, when I want to CYA.

That's just a gentler way of saying: "Henceforth we will be permanently archiving all of your communications."

No one cares about WhatsApp :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com