US agencies warn companies: Don’t delete Slack or Signal chats
news.bloomberglaw.com
news.bloomberglaw.com
I know what you're thinking, "Slack is our project archive." If that's actually true, .gov investigations are the LEAST of your problems.
or seven years if the SEC is watching over you.
In practice, I’ve never seen a “more-correct” system actually replace the value of long-lived chat channels and a culture of discussing things out in the open on those channels.
Long-lived chats don’t replace documentation and project management, but I’ve yet to see those replace the value of long-lived chats.
Now, it probably could be replaced by companies putting project management in a non-hellish tool that’s close to the code and has a pleasant chatting-about-issues experience and low structure so you don’t feel like you’re knocking over some PM’s sand castle if you mess with it (so NOT jira, asana, et c) but I’ve never experienced a company that does that. Communicating in the PM tools is always terrible.
It would ideally force employees to take notes and keep comms/project management sane, however I'm more likely to believe people would just get used to finding an easier workaround or guessing.
One example: https://www.exterro.com/e-discovery-software/legal-hold
Sure, it's all legal and perfectly reasonable at the micro level considering that every stored email increases the legal fees (due to making discovery more expensive during any hypothetical future lawsuit), but at a macro level, the outcome "companies legally delete all written communications as soon as feasible" seems baffling.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the financial industry, where regulators effectively require recording every single bit of business communication (by taking a very liberal interpretation of some quite old law, as far as I understand), written or spoken (unless it was in person, of course), and under threat of massive fines.
It seems to me like there should be some pragmatic middle ground somewhere between these two extremes?
If it's policy, it's legal. You can't go around and delete the stuff after the fact.
Meanwhile, we now have people putting stuff into their own personal information management systems, training various models on the data, etc. When the company ceases to be a valuable library of the information necessary to do your job, people start specifically archiving things that might be useful at some point in the future, and the discovery process becomes unbounded.
It's absolutely about discovery costs. Document review is typically like a quarter of all litigation cost, and that's assuming the problem of "get all the docs" is solved already.
(Very loose retelling of just a few of the sorts of things I saw when writing an expert witness report years ago.)
This is why when I saw the Signal Forum discussions on deleting chats that I was really surprised that that community was extremely against it (strongly in favor of immutable texts). All arguments against privacy were dismissed with claims that one can screenshot and arguments for immutable texts were bad analogies to mail and assertions about "my device, my data." The Signal Forums are a weird place and I think Signal's reliance on them contributes to their slow progress, adoption, and why they get weirdly sidetracked about things no one cares about.
> is also not going to work because if they don't like it there are several other ways they can copy it
>> All arguments against privacy were dismissed with claims that one can screenshot
> you have no guarantees
>> stochastically increases privacy and security
I'm not sure why we have to frame privacy and security with strict guarantees. If we need strict guarantees then we should abandon all efforts because guarantees do not exist (my preemptive response to what you are thinking is "implementation.") Fundamentally it is always stochastic as statistics is a way to capture error and uncertainty.
Everyone that advocates for deletion is well aware that one can screenshot, copy, or even write down information. It is a weird assumption to make, because it implies an exceptional level of stupidity to the person you respond to. Every 12 year old knows that you can screenshot Snapchats and they know it can be done without Snapchat warning the other person. So forgive me, because while I know you are acting in good intent (we've had enough conversations that I have that respect for you), I think I need to point out that it is easy to read such a response as indicating you did not bother to read my comment (so why comment?) or that you imply I am incredibly naive. I say this because this topic is often heated so stating this can help reduce the inference gap. I know you are not trying to do such a thing, but not all others will have that shared history to give benefit of the doubt.
There's nuance necessary beyond the existence of copy methods. People with positions similar to mine understand that the act of copying requires time and energy. That someone needs to either preemptively implement a system of record keeping or that such an action is responsive. In the latter case, having the ability to delete acts as a windowing operation. You do not know your adversaries a priori nor do all adversaries begin as adversaries. So if you can delete the information before a log is created, you have succeeded. Yes, this is stochastic. But I'd rather have a 1% of protection than a 0%, because an immutable history just means the adversary has unlimited time to strike. Basically, you are doing your adversary's job for them. tldr: the game has a temporal component and it is not turn based.
I will understand arguments about communication, of how some may assume stronger protection than received, but I'd also respond that this is a fairly universal claim and we do not apply it to many other domains as we still find utility.
I'll also add that this stochastic protection is why companies will remotely wipe your devices if they are reported lost or stolen. You wipe for protection but operate under assumption that the data was copied. This is fairly standard practice.
Part of this is that the rest of the argument is often implied and then you say something expecting the other person to fill in the rest without actually writing the words.
> stochastically increases privacy and security
The question is, whose security? If you can delete the message from the recipient's device then they can't use it against you, or otherwise use it to their advantage even if their use doesn't negatively affect you (e.g. so they can refresh their recollection of what was said or confirm your assertion that you did say that). Which means it's a trade off, but also means that the other user often has the incentive to take action to defeat this, because their device is acting against their interests in favor of yours.
This is how you get forks of the client, which is one of the things Signal doesn't like.
> If we need strict guarantees then we should abandon all efforts because guarantees do not exist (my preemptive response to what you are thinking is "implementation.") Fundamentally it is always stochastic as statistics is a way to capture error and uncertainty.
Yes and no. Everything is always stochastic because there is a 1 in 2^256 chance they could guess your AES key by random chance on the first try, but even if that's true in theory it need not be in practice. In many cases you can regard something as having a strong guarantee when the chances are low enough to be disregarded, even if they're not low enough to be literally zero in a theoretical sense.
Whereas the ability of someone to screenshot a message you don't want them to be able to retain is within the capability of ordinary users, so the amount of practical protection it provides is minor and is only worth doing if it isn't a trade off against something non-trivial. And then you have the trade offs against the desire of the recipient to not have their messages deleted against their will and the desire of the foundation to not give those users an incentive to fork the client to reduce their inconvenience in retaining them.
There is also the potential to mislead a naive user into relying on the feature not contemplating how easily it could be bypassed and then they give someone a permanent copy of something they only intended to provide access to temporarily.
What you could do is make support for the feature optional. The sender requests deletion and then the recipient can configure their client to respect it or not. This was always within the recipient's power, the sender couldn't have enforced it anyway, but now the message can be automatically deleted if the sender and the recipient both want it to be, and no one is given a false understanding of how the system works or an incentive to try to defeat it because they're in possession of a device which is acting against their wishes.
To be fair, there is a lot of compression in language. I am often accused of being overly verbose but I only object to the adverb. We're both verbose here and inference is still necessary. I believe there was the necessary information to make the inference jump. Screenshot was an explicit illustrative example where I think you can sufficiently assume that I'm aware of mechanisms to copy the data or at least could infer that the existence of such mechanisms would be unconvincing. I will still stand by the stronger claim that we can assume that an average person is aware of screenshots or some copy mechanism as usage is quite prolific.
> The question is, whose security?
This, is a great question and the one I'd rather have. There is certainly arguments for both sides. I think the argument you are trying to make is about protection. Such as if someone sent you something that constitutes harassment but then deletes it prior to you using this as evidence against their abuse. I agree that that is of concern. But I am a firm believer in Blackstone's Ratio and subsequently my preferred mode of failure for the judicial system is to bias towards failing to prosecute criminals (false negatives) rather than biasing towards prosecuting law-abiding citizens (false positives).
> the other user often has the incentive to take action to defeat this, because their device is acting against their interests in favor of yours.
I do not buy this claim. I have no incentive to make or use a Signal fork when friends default to disappearing messages. The incentive only exists if I am suspicious of an adversarial reasoning for their data retention policy. In fact, in today's age, one could argue that this policy could imply reason to trust over reason to suspect as it implies that they are operating in an environment where they are unable to leverage my data against me (such as creating a LLM that speaks like me). I think there is a lot of nuance here that can't be easily dismissed. I think, like the former issue, that position is going to be more dependent on one's preferred mode of failure rather than preference of normal operation (which is likely not severely affected). I'll mention that we can use Reddit as a natural experiment, where users have actually a large incentive to edit their comments to make the person they're arguing with look foolish or naive. In practice, we see editing being used at far higher rates for resolving types/grammar or means of increasing clarity (like adding links), and often volunteering what content was modified. There's sufficient evidence for me to believe, on average, people value their own integrity over incentives to manipulate the conversation.
> Everything is always stochastic because there is a 1 in 2^256 chance
My preemptive response was more about that you must not just account for the brute force calculation, but the implementation. This is why I mentioned how statistics captures uncertainty. The tool is quite powerful in even fully deterministic frameworks because infinite resolution does not exist. We're both on HN so I think it is fair to assume we are both familiar with many examples where highly encrypted data was accessed and when implementation was performed by experts or those we'd expect to be experts. Something something weakest link.
I will claim that all security is stochastic and there are no (epsilon = 0) guarantees and I will make an additional claim about the former being unobjectionable (self-referential stochasticism intended)
> Whereas the ability of someone to screenshot
This may be where we've speaking past one another. I think we have different conditioning in how we're optimizing here. I place little weighting to the desired condition. I am more concerned with utility focused conditions. While I recognize that the search function is used (and even use it myself), generally we're just hoarders. The vast majority of text, pictures, and other data we generate serves little utility beyond a small temporal window. FWIW, I do advocate for Signal implementing an archival/favoriting mechanism (currently I forward messages to Notes To Self, which is analogous to a screenshot ;). Maybe I am jumping the gun here though and we will find future utility in that data. I could in fact want to train a LLM to act as me. Or maybe I want to build a classifier to search the internet and locate all posts that have a high likelihood of being written by me regardless of the username I used. But I think the bias should be to act conservatively and collect minimal information. Without a doubt that information does represent a avenue for abuse, so without an intended usage it does not warrant archiving. If we're going to get into legality, data often belongs to the person that generated it. As an example, a photographer can take a picture of Taylor Swift and because she is a public icon she can be sued for posting the photo on her instagram (I'm sure this would change if she was not a public icon).
So to be explicit on the conditioning: I do not see that allowing one to delete or even nuke chats would result in a meaningful difference in a standard setting. I do recognize there are special circumstances where this can be abused and used against you. But I also recognize that there are special circumstances where this can be used in your favor (e.g. suppose you are a political dissident in an authoritarian regime. Your friend sees you picked up by police. Your friend can nuke your chat, which can serve to protect both of you, as it is clear that authorities will be unable to copy the phone's contents at time of arrest). So the optimization objective is different. I do not believe my optimization objectives (which consider threat models not faced by a typical American or even likely typical human) would meaningfully decrease conversational utility. I want to stress that I am only proposing the capacity to destroy information, not any specific data retention policy. My concerns are about being able to adapt to the dynamic environment as I do not have sufficient a priori knowledge to predict who may be a future adversary nor what type of data makes me vulnerable and the potential damage. "First they came for..." is of concern as we do not need technology to change for vulnerabilities to rapidly change.
> There is also the potential to mislead a naive user
I agree and actually acknowledged this point. The acceptable level of users misunderstanding features is non-zero. I believe a warning contained in the deletion dialogue is sufficient to met an acceptable threshold. Do you disagree?
And I must be clear, I do not believe there are many people that would put in the effort to fork, log, or screenshot messages were there a standard policy of auto-deletion. While it isn't hard to screenshot, the task is tedious in the environment. I am sure you do not log HN, Reddit, or other forums that you may chat on. I'm sure there are many methods of communication where logging is trivial but you do not implement it. Certainly this is true for all code we write hahaha
> What you could do is make support for the feature optional.
I do actually advocate for that position despite actually believing the capacity to disable does substantially decrease utility. The proposal was rejected by the Signal community while there was strong support from other users on my side. But it is a concession I am willing to make for the same reasons I request the feature in the first place: something is better than nothing. I'd strongly advocate for the feature to be enabled by default (referencing aforementioned low rates of abuse), and that the mechanism needs to be configured beforehand. I would oppose a system that requires confirmation from the non-issuing side as this undermines the main utility that the functionality provides. I assume default applies to any new chat, configuration can happen at a per chat level (with consent), and again the default falls to enabled as this is what I believe provides the higher level of security and privacy.
So if you want to convince me, I'd say you would need to focus your argument on topics such as how the feature provides little to no utility, not to just the average user (who I expect to never use it) but to those most vulnerable. Or address why I may have poor assumptions about rates of abuse. Or if you can provide some strong convincing examples of how no capacity to delete provides a higher rate of security and/or privacy (of course, weighed against counterexamples (everything is stochastic to me, you can use that in your favor), since I think we're both intelligent enough to recognize that there are examples for both directions and singular non-generalizable examples are insufficient. I will do my best to read examples as illustrative and attempt to infer additional scenarios that are similar). I am very open to being wrong and am certain there are aspects that I have not considered, but I do think I have strong evidence for my current position.
And lastly, I do appreciate the more nuanced discussion. I think more of these need to happen as I think many topics are much more complex than we like to think.
I don't disagree that it's legal and mentioned that in my comment. What I'm claiming is that the way in which the legal system has evolved has incentivized problematic behaviors.
> there's going to be who-knows-how-much embarrassing personal gossip in there, too and that just makes folks look bad
That's what I was referring to by "making discovery more expensive during any hypothetical future lawsuit". Part of that cost is due to legal fees for discovery, but the other part is reputational harm:
The problem here again isn't courts and parties to the lawsuit having access to that data, but rather that it's being explicitly published for the entire world to see and share.
Personal gossip has absolutely no reason to be published as part of a lawsuit, in my view. If it's relevant to the case, make it available to its parties, read it out during the (usually public but non-broadcast) trial etc., but don't put it on an online case filing platform. Get rid of that, and the incentive to delete literally anything that's not legally required to be archived goes away too.
Not exactly.
One of the reasons companies do this is that random employees don't know how laws and courts work. They'll say things without knowing that the words they're using are a term of art with a different meaning in the law than it has the way they're using it, and then write something which would be damning if it was what they actually meant, but it wasn't what they actually meant. Or that sounds damning if taken out of context. Also, sometimes they really are breaking the law without knowing it and not having the evidence of that sitting around isn't really to the company's advantage either.
The only real way to prevent companies from wanting to delete it would be to make it so it couldn't be used against them if they kept it.
And this is what we need to change. We need a presumption that when a non-lawyer says “we should form a cartel with our competitors” that they aren’t implying anything illegal, even though cartels are illegal.
Lets jump from civil to criminal law, where you do have the presumption of innocence.
Let's say you send a message that says "I'm going to kill Jon with kindness" to someone else on your team . Then the next day Jon ends up violently murdered. Even though the content of your message is one that does not condone any particular violent act, you should 100% expect to be a target of the investigation.
This is reasonable. In civil trials where it's not beyond a reasonable doubt, but a preponderance of evidence, these little things could tip the balance out of your favor.
Or you could just not retain the record and instantly avoid what is potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost for review and argument and millions of dollars of "loss in the expectation". A 1% chance of failing the win in your argument and taking a $100m loss as a result is a million dollar loss in the expectation, and even a darn good legal position will still often have a more than 1% chance of being lost.
> these little things could tip the balance out of your favor.
Yes, and out of the direction of justice... and certainly at a disproportional cost.
>The best evidence against you is no evidence.
Hence, you were agreeing with what I said.
If you saying ”we should form a cartel with our competitors" somehow magically maps to a different sense than the form that'd be illegal, you've turned it into nonsense.
Not to mention that I could say "Boop bop bleep zorp skippidy do da", and if every time I do, me and the chums go off and form a cartel; then it doesn't matter the words I'm using to describe it, it matters what I'm doing.
If you can't put it in writing for fear of eDiscovery; you probably shouldn't be doing it.
The sentence "This seems like a really shitty way to treat our customers," is going to both look bad and be relevant to lots of lawsuits. On the other hand, if a company doesn't have a communications channel in which people can freely say this, they're going to end up treating their customers in shitty ways a lot more.
It is not about gossip, it is very much about management knowing about illegal shit, wanting to keep it and wanting to hide it.
All of that is pure gold to an attorney looking to put a company in as bad a light as possible.
That leads us to directly to "2028 – A Dystopian Story" By Jack Ganssle:
http://www.ganssle.com/articles/2028adystopianstory.htm
That explains why no records are to be kept, and this is the real law:
Known as ’The Rule of 26’, which is sometimes given as a reason NOT to keep engineering notebooks etc. By Federal Rule 26 you are guilty if you did not volunteer the records before they are requested. Including any backups.
From Cornel Law:
LII Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 26. Duty to Disclose; General Provisions Governing Discovery
Rule 26. Duty to Disclose; General Provisions Governing Discovery
(a) Required Disclosures.
(1) Initial Disclosure.
(A) In General. Except as exempted by Rule 26(a)(1)(B) or as otherwise stipulated or ordered by the court, a party must, without awaiting a discovery request, provide to the other parties:
(i) the name and, if known, the address and telephone number of each individual likely to have discoverable information—along with the subjects of that information—that the disclosing party may use to support its claims or defenses, unless the use would be solely for impeachment;
(ii) a copy—or a description by category and location—of all documents, electronically stored information, and tangible things that the disclosing party has in its possession, custody, or control and may use to support its claims or defenses, unless the use would be solely for impeachment; …
Don't we see this in practice? I mean I'm not talking about engineering logs or documenting code (we all know that doesn't happen, but it is due to laziness), but how there are some people who have strong preferences to conversations happening via phone conversations or in person. Since those prevent official records and there are stronger protections around those media.
I'm thinking Slack is my conversation archive.
Wouldn't you consider it really fucking weird if every time you had an informal, in-person discussion with a friend, or maybe a partner, or even a co-worker, that they insisted on writing everything both of you said in a notebook to keep a permanent record of it, in case they wanted to call you out on something you kind of blurted out without too much thought ten years from now, or to be able to turn it over to the authorities if they ever (incorrectly?) thought you might be implicated in something dodgy? Or for it to be available for someone to steal and/or make copies of?
They can never just have a chat with you? Shoot the shit and put the world to rights, without you keeping meticulous records of every goddamn word they said off the cuff?
You don't think that, maybe, the more our real lives move online, the more that that kind of friendly, informal, ephemeral conversation ought to be able to move online?
Apps exist for the ephemeral conversation you desire. Like Snapchat. Where one of the features is conversations disappear.
I don't think everything is so gloom and doom like you make it out to be.
It's script snippets, customer support information, links, design decisions etc.
Of course this stuff should be preserved in knowledgebases, tickets, commit messages etc, and it is, but sometimes people forget or something doesn't seem worth documenting. That's slacks main selling point for me, the ease of finding some technical conversation from 6 months ago.
yes, it is a tradeoff. most things don't need to be recorded. but what we like to record and what not varies from person to person. many chat apps allow you to temporarily turn on automatic deletion of messages, and some allow you to delete old messages. it would actually be good to do from time to time to weed out the actually irrelevant stuff but it takes effort to do that.
the key feature though for me is that recording messages helps me resume an interrupted conversation. and when you get older and start loosing friends as they pass away, these are also memories of the good times that you have had together.
what we need is better laws to protect our privacy, that say don't allow old messages to be used regardless if they are stored or not, so that we don't run into the current situation that those who were so dumb to not delete the messages are at a disadvantage.
Like....my emails? My SMS messages?
And large archives also dramatically increase costs of complying with civil discovery, which already can make the most ridiculous lawsuit costs millions just to ‘deal with’.
https://www.wired.com/1998/09/microsoft-subpoenas-bad-attitu...
(not linking to jwz's own recollection of the event, due to HN referral trap)
https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html
about that list, i am sorry, but i don't feel that badmouthing anyone is healthy ever. doing that in a group is not catharsis but it is reinforcing bad attitudes, discontent or even hatred. that is not something i want in my company.
if any of my employees set up such a list or forum, i would tell them to stop that immediately, under threat of being fired if they didn't comply. not because of the risks involved, but because i do not want anyone to think that doing that is ok. it isn't!
Perhaps its best to just never say anything that you wouldn't want published.
but that is not an excuse.
and it's not healthy to encourage others either.
Noting people murder each other too doesn’t encourage it.
If one would prefer to not have folks murdering each other near them, if anything it can help them keep an eye out better.
regarding murder, lynch mobs did exist, and they were also encouraged by allowing them to gather and normalizing that behavior. it's not talking about murder that encourages it, it's talking about it in a positive way that does.
groups that tolerate bad behavior generally tend to end up encouraging it if they don't put a stop to it. there are plenty of examples for that out there. just think about protests go out of hand. one person breaks a window, sets a trash can on fire, steals something from a shop and more people join in.
the only way to stop that is to keep ourselves in check and not allow such behavior but stop it when it happens. allowing those lists to be created did the opposite.
if you need to badmouth something, find a therapist.
that would be great, but i didn't have that impression.
statements like people do it all the time and you asking who is encouraging anyone made it look like you didn't agree. in particular the claim that people do it all the time is often used as an excuse to allow such behavior to continue.
i am not angry at you. i am sorry if it looks like that. i am however angry at the attitude that because such behavior is common and it should be tolerated. which is how i interpreted your response.
if i misread that, i apologize.
I was trying to do the equivalent of pointing out that the comment was similar to something like ‘murder is terrible and wrong!’ (which implies it wouldn’t happen naturally), that that is all well and good - but it happens all the time, often even with a LOT of work being done to stop it. At least for any sufficiently large group of people. Murder happens naturally, just like people talking shit about folks they don’t like. One could argue one is just a more extreme version of the other.
So if someone has responsibility for the company (in this talking shit about people example) or city/county/state/country whatever (in the murder context), pretending it won’t happen and so not having mechanisms to discourage it and clean up the mess/minimize the damage will just result in an even bigger and more damaging mess.
Why have rules against something or people to enforce those rules for something that won’t happen, after all.
So having HR rules against these sorts of groups is a good idea. As is having a reasonably short retention rule to minimize damage when someone ends up doing it anyway. (since even firing someone doesn’t get rid of those emails) And paying attention to pending problems on this front to proactively reduce risk. Then it might only happen 1%, or .001% of the rate it otherwise would. Which is good.
But for any sufficiently large group, it’s never going to be 0% of the time. And for a very large group, that can end up costing them many many many billions of $.
Maybe that's good from a company perspective, but from an employee perspective not being able to search old conversations is abysmal.
In later jobs we were using slack and they auto-deleted them after a week or two. We were allowed to create persistent slack channels that were private. This whole area is a waste of time, where the lawyers reduced the legal risk of the company from lawsuits, they transferred the cost to their dev teams wasting time managing this. At this company "our developers are our most important resource" but we weren't that important. I told my manager that all the devs were wasting time with this, probably a few hours a week figuring out if they should "preserve something" to remember decisions that were made. He agree it was a huge waste of time.
I think Amazon also follows that practice. It assigns something like 2GB of email storage for everyone, and also has a policy in place to ask to increment storage by 250MB bumps. At each request, users are gently nudged to just delete emails.
Edit: illegal -> a legal
Matt Levine has written about this a lot - back in the day when these rules were made, the only writing that were meant to be preserved were handwritten letters and memos. Today, regulators have a treasure trove of communication on which to build a case - their only limitation is the ability to process it.
It's funny to me how many of these cases end up getting built on an email that turns up in a search where someone says "gee - I really think we are doing a crime here! Are we doing a crime? I really hope we aren't doing a crime."
Like, the person might have had the most innocent intentions, but they end up manifesting the charges they are complicit in. Meanwhile, companies who do some real evil stuff get off scot-free because no one had the moral thought to have their doubts in writing.
No, belief or doubts has absolutely nothing to do with whether you committed a crime or not.
It has to do with whether it was with malice/intention.
Fraud, for instance. Or murder vs manslaughter vs ‘an accident’.
Smoking gun emails can totally sink a case or get people convicted.
Murder is a crime, manslaughter is a crime.
Criminal fraud requires intent, civil fraud does not.
Lacking intent does not make it "scot-free."
Criminal fraud and civil fraud both require knowledge (or a reasonable belief that it was likely) that one was lying - which is intent, if one moves forward.
Thinking you are telling the truth (actually!) means no fraud.
There are many crimes that do not exist without intent.
There are also many crimes that exist regardless of intent, like possession of controlled substances, statutory rape, etc.
Now damn near anything can be a tort of course, but while those can produce large damages in a civil suit - they aren’t crimes per se. You’d need a criminal violation for that.
Not that they are likely to be able to do much. My company first presses the button in exchange to lock everything electronic I have so I cannot delete it, before they let me know that I need to save everything (or so they claim...). Thus I cannot really delete anything. I might be able to shred something, but who keeps paper records of anything (and if by chance I do have one, odds are it is a printout of something where there is still an electronic copy). While I don't know what company you work for, it they have any size at all they should have similar processes in place so there is nothing you can delete - but the act of attempting it will be noted and brought to court.
Looks like this is only (especially) applicable once the company in question has been officially notified of an active ongoing government investigation.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/competition-matters/2024/01/...
(Background: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/no-cha...)
It also had the nice benefit of forcing people to store actual knowledge in Notion where it could be organized and more easily discoverable.
Anyway, all this to say - there are many reasons to purge slack history that aren’t nefarious (even if the practice is ill advised by some)
Instead we keep choosing a SPOF after another with some that even state "that's for safety"...
Try to imaging why we chose for instance to switch from classic cvs/svn systems to dCVS ones. Try to realize how simple is design desktops that works like desktops, of course you do not sync a copy of a multi-TB database locally but most stuff, docs, sources, mails and so can perfectly be local+sync issueless. Of course on a FDE storage.
Why keeping modern desktops used as dumb terminals since they are far more capable than a classic dumb terminal and they cost as well because of that?
As soon as you start/resume paying, you can access them again.
I don’t really have an issue with bezos using it unless he was under investigation.
If they want to get access maybe they should try some sort of wiretap law to get access to messages before they are deleted ? Place bugs in the board rooms ? Maybe there needs to be a modern way to capture the crime in progress the same way they bugged gotti?
Though, you are right that most places ignore email until you get going pretty well, and then by that point the cat is out of the bag. It used to be that only official communications where important. And that was largely managed by you only kept official communications archived. Now that we can archive anything, it is getting kind of silly.
Signal though would be a different matter entirely.
There's no technical reason that lets you keep Slack, chat, or email and prevents keeping phone calls and video. It's all just digital data.
I'd expect we'll see the requirements change to include these.
Management have been using phones to bypass record keeping for well over half a century.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-live-transcr...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365-life-hacks/org....
Well I wonder when "Facebook-scale" can do untargeted spying? Like, record and transcribe your Whatsapp calls without knowing that you are a high value product or dissident. I guess it would be to expansive to do right now, compute wise?
I am seriously thinking about making my own VOIP app for the phone to try to mitigate these kinds of attacks.
The live-captions tool in Teams is already better at understanding some of my colleagues than I am. The tech’s there, and probably already was good-enough before LLMs.
Generally recording phone calls is only a crime if there is an expectation of privacy, which would also be hard to say existed on a group phone call or video chat, especially if one of the parties knew for sure it could be recorded (and consented to it by continuing to work for the company).
Federal law would make it legal to record such a call, for instance.
California might make it illegal, might not - all the parties would have to expect it to be a non confidential call.
Which a group call? Hard to argue that’s confidential.
Calling a random person in a company, where you don’t know if it is being recorded or not? Ehhhh.
Also, in California there is an exemption to these recording laws - you can use illegal recordings to defend yourself against perjury, or in the prosecution/defense of certain heinous crimes like extortion, kidnapping, murder, etc. (633.5 CPC) [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....]
It’s a shame Justia doesn’t link to that, as it’s quite important in some situations.
[https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-call...]
“Under California law, it is a crime punishable by fine and/or imprisonment to record a confidential conversation without the consent of all parties, or without a notification of the recording to the parties via an audible beep at specific intervals. The California Supreme Court has defined a confidential conversation as one in which the parties have a reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or eavesdropping. In addition to criminal penalties, illegal recording can also give rise to civil damages.
CA Penal Code § 632 (definition & penalty), § 637.2 (civil damages), Flanagan v. Flanagan, 41 P.3d 575 (Cal. 2002), Cal. Pub. Util. Code Gen. Order 107-B(II)(A)”