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But they're not archiving your chit-chat with your coworkers over the water cooler. For pilots, they are (in the cockpit). So I can halfway see the pilots' point.

[Edit: I mean, voice chit-chat. Just talking to each other. That gets recorded for pilots, and not for software engineers, no matter how long they keep our (text) chats for. Stuff gets said in person, by voice, that would never get typed out in a chat.]

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I would be shocked if most companies are not maintaining long duration archives of employee emails, Slack, Teams, whatever medium.

Chat logs are tiny.

I’d be shocked if most companies are retaining these logs longer than the legally mandated minimum. This kind of information is radioactive from a legal perspective. Slack and Teams even advertise automated deletion as a feature.

Long-duration archives can be used against the company in a lawsuit - whoever's suing you would love to get decades of material to look through to help make their case.

As such, it's a large liability, and most companies retain those sorts of records for the minimum amount of time acceptable by law/regulation/customary expectations.

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