Feds tell companies to preserve IM and other corporate chats | Hacker News Reader

Feds tell companies to preserve IM and other corporate chats

ftc.gov

31 pointscampuscodi14 comments

I wonder if this is another unstated motivation for RTO? A much larger portion of my day-to-day conversations are over text than when I worked in an office.

This has a huge upside - when I can't remember what someone said to me about something two months ago, I can search! But I'm sure it makes legal nervous. (I don't think I'm personally working on anything that would get us sued - but some folks in my fortune 500 co. doubtlessly are)

Not really - video calls are not subject to disclosure/obligated to be recorded, so it's the same as in office - if you want to avoid a record, call someone and don't take notes.

Having been at Google: this will bring back the telephone. Many employees don't even get a phone unless they ask for it, although maybe lawyers do (not sure).

If "off the record" IM isn't really off the record, then there's no point in doing it.

Is there an obligation to record meetings, too?

No. But nearly all larger meetings are online (Hangout, it used to be) and sometimes they're recorded. So IF they've recorded it, presumably they have to preserve it now.

Where I'm at, this is already known -- all they're saying to is preserve history after subpoenas.

Of course, this might encourage tightening up the retention policy -- right now Slack is allowed to go significantly longer than email before default deletion.

Microsoft Teams already generates a ton of data(down to reactions on messages) that you can see in the Entra activity log. I guess this is aimed more at Slack, etc. which I am sure already has plenty of logs somewhere.

This does nothing to address the out-of-band channels. Most of my working peers will use Signal or other applications to communicate off the record so this is mostly window dressing.

The press release does mention Signal explicitly, so I guess companies need to enable message backups for it.

If the corporation does not explicitly state that Signal is an acceptable chat tool, but Signal can be successfully used, is the corporation responsible for messages passed by an employee over Signal?

Where I work, using signal or any other tool for something related to work is a fireable offense.

If you want something OTR, it's either a phone call or a f2f.

On a somewhat related note, it's my opinion that Slack could be using private DMs for advertising purposes. My friends and I were skeptical at first after they started getting ads in Instagram/FB and other platforms immediately after we'd mention a product. We figured it was coming from another source. We then started testing it by mentioning products in our private chats that we'd never searched or talked about elsewhere (Fish Food for example, none of us have pet fish). Lo and behold we'd start getting ads for them.

I understand that, for example, in Slack and Google Workspace you have specific plans for more information retention. The question, economically-wise, is if this is enforced how does it apply in company costs. Thinking mainly about SMBs in different countries.

In my limited observation, the prices for Slack and Google are "normalized" for developed countries.

Given that Zoom, Teams etc. auto create transcripts for meetings, when do these transcripts become documents that must be preserved?

It seems like they could make the case that all those digital meetings need to be transcribed and preserved? Is a "do not transcribe" option all that different than an auto-delete option?

[dupe]

More discussion a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39145252

Reply on news.ycombinator.com