Hacker News Reader

Comment by saryant | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance, but if a company exists in an industry with mandated data retention/logging, wouldn’t those laws apply equally to IM as to email? In other words, if the law requires that internal communication be logged they’d be screwed either way in your scenario.

Maybe the laws in question are so narrowly crafted that they apply only to email, I don’t know. Seems like a strange justification for the switch though.

View on HN

>wouldn’t those laws apply equally to IM as to email? In other words, if the law requires that internal communication be logged they’d be screwed either way in your scenario.

then how about oral "instant messaging"?

As someone who has written email and IM compliance software used by 22 of the top 25 banks I can tell you that there is a requirement for data retention of any electronic communication for the vast majority of financial institutions. If you're required by law to archive your communications you need to either comply or get an exemption from your regulator (highly unlikely).

This mitigation strategy only works if the law doesn't require you to retain the data. I've worked at communication companies that only retained email for 7 days, but they weren't obligated to retain their emails by law.

Companies often have policies which dictate rapid purging of communications and other documents (such as every month). This allows them to escape an Enron style paper shredding fiasco, and in certain industries is very advantageous.

Of course, that's not to say this what Atos has in mind, but it's not a new tactic by any means.

Yes. But relatively few industries actually have such a requirement. This particular company is a consulting company.

The other thing to consider is that Microsoft Lync is also a phone and video chat system. Don't assume that IM replaces email -- I'd bet you would see alot of voice/video.

Yes and it applies to telephones too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com