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Comment by elevatedastalt | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but technology lets us have ephemeral conversations, which are meant to replicate the temporariness of verbal conversations. That's what the "disappearing" messages of Signal are. And that's what the FTC claim is about.

It's okay for text intended to be permanent to be held to the standard of permanent text.

But creating an expectation that text that is fundamentally intended to be ephemeral should be treated as permanent text does not sound reasonable.

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The problem is that the ephemeralitt of a chat between two peers requires physical colocation. The regulations on message retention kicked in when we started leveraging networks to increase the distance across which these messages could propagate.

The "crime" is not the chatting. It's using the wires to do it. The danger is the utilization of network infrastructure to facilitate criminal activity.

Or at least that seems to be my view of things.

But it also doesn't apply to voice calls or even multi-party meetings held over something like Teams despite the ability to record or even auto transcribe them.

I bet that it does apply to transcripts of meetings. This means, of course, that people with hearing or memory problems will be locked out of leadership because the company can't take the risk that accessibility tooling increases their exposure to discovery. Which is what makes me angriest about this double standard - text is a critical accessibility feature for many people.

>This means, of course, that people with hearing or memory problems will be locked out of leadership

Americans with Disabilities Act says "Hi". Lock someone out of a position solely on the basis of avoiding a reasonable accommodation for the sake of avoiding creation of a business record to do skulduggerous things, and you've just handed someone a sizable cause of action against you.

Seriously, just stop trying to do illegal shit and get away with it and accept that sometimes the way through actually includes changing the rules first, or that any business model that requires you to do something illegal that can only be mitigate by getting away with it long enough to create an issue after scaling should probably be DOA for a reason you haven't bothered to read up on yet.

I know... I know... Read the room. Totally not HN's bag. Get a load of this square, so on, and so forth. I've done my stint in startups. I've seen the harms they can cause. I've been on the receiving end of the industry's lack of care long enough to realize that these regulations exist for a reason. Part of it is to create generous hooks whereby the legal system can actually introspect what you're up to while you're enjoying the benefits of government granted legal fictions.

A good enterprise doesn't need crime. Simple as.

I mean that you're not required to archive a transcript of every meeting if you weren't already planning on creating the transcript in the first place. Once it's created, agreed, I would expect it to become a business record akin to meeting minutes of board meetings.

Calls for finance jobs are routinely recorded as official business. You may not be recording multi-party meetings, but those are more a case of being a young technology than anything else.

Regulations don’t apply to voided conferences that don’t involve text communication.

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