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Comment by dumpster_fire | Hacker News Reader

Slightly different. Google Chat logs aren't direct p2p, they are most definitely logged records. Otherwise the messages wouldn't still be there when you log out and back in. However, they are tagged to be ephemeral and self-destruct after 24h.

So how would the law here work? If I delete my chat logs it's illegal. But if I create a feature that helps me delete my chat logs, it's not?

Honestly I have no idea.

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Phone calls also aren't direct p2p and can be trivially recorded, so that's irrelevant. Google Chat does not retain messages when history is off, according to their own documentation:

https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7657597?hl=en#zippy=...

"Not covered: history off"

If it turns out their documentation is wrong and off-the-record chats aren't actually off the record then yes, you will be correct. But where is the evidence that it's the case? Google Apps is used by hundreds of thousands of companies and it has a sophisticated infrastructure for implementing retention limits and legal holds. Why are people here assuming that all that work has been done by incompetents?

I don't understand why you're comparing to phone calls here when the post you're replying to starts with "Google Chat logs aren't direct p2p, they are most definitely logged records. Otherwise the messages wouldn't still be there when you log out and back in." which is simply not true for voice calls, which are synchronous. Chats are asynchronous and store history in the client so you can scroll back (even if history is eventually purged client side on a timer or when you exit), and if chat history is enabled on the server, they store it there too.

A better point of comparison would be voicemails, but I don't think we're talking about those.

> Google Chat logs aren't direct p2p, they are most definitely logged records. Otherwise the messages wouldn't still be there when you log out and back in.

That's not how p2p works. Signal messages are not p2p but the server doesn't need to store them because the clients store what they've received. Same for pop3 email clients which talk to the email server (not p2p to the sender). Quite a few systems work this way that are not peer to peer. Not sure if you meant p2p literally or if it was a shorthand for systems that don't work like Telegram that store everything on the server forever (in which case I guess it must seem like I am just being pedantic, which I'm not trying to be).

No you're right, I was slightly worried about the usage of p2p and was expecting someone to correct me. Apologies for using the wrong word.

I was referring to the fact that self-destruct messages in Google Chat can be seen within 24h regardless of which device you log in with, this means it has to have been stored server side.

Signal has multi-device self-destruct also, even to a few seconds, but that doesn't mean that you can't see it anymore on your laptop if the phone in your pocket fetched it and your laptop was rebooting. The message is (as I understand it) addressed to both devices, probably Signal doesn't even need to know whether the recipients are one account or whether it's a group chat, or that the message has a self-destruct timer set on it. The server just stores messages until the client for which it was intended has fetched them (with some maximum, I guess). Google's chat could work the same, but I'm not sure we can know that. The server software is probably not open source.

If the law tells you "if you delete any of your text communications relative to this case I will slap you" and you either:

* Make text communications and manually delete them after

* Make text communications through a channel that you yourself set to delete after

* Try to take the piss out of the law and say on your text communication "let's talk about this subject that I definitely have to record all my texts for in person so I don't have to send texts"

should you really be surprised when the law slaps the shit out of you ? If there's one thing it hates, it's being taken for a fool.

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