Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcchambers | Hacker News Reader

ELI5: why is there any expectation for corporations to keep chat logs or emails long term? Is there some legal requirement I don't understand?

View on HN

Google records chat by default. But it appears they had a policy if they were going to discuss something that could look bad if subpoenaed that chat recording should be turned off before discussing it.

No, this is not true. By default, starting a private chat with another employee defaulted to “history off” (as far as I can remember; I left Google >1 year ago now).

Right, but I'm not clear, is that actually illegal? I've seen similar policies at many companies.

They were under order from the court to preserve communications, and changed their corporate policy to use channels that auto-deleted communications when talking about things that they might not want the court to see.

When you're in or reasonably expect to be in litigation, you have an obligation to preserve evidence for discovery.

You do not have an obligation to create records for that purpose, however, only to preserve what you do create.

It's ridiculous that a private company can be forced to make private discussions available to be used against themselves.

Google/Alphabet is a public company?….

They are a "private sector" company in the sense that they are not a "public sector" (i.e., government) entity.

They are a "publicy traded" company (like Tesla) because their shares are available on the stock market for non-qualified investors, and not "privately held" (like SpaceX).

Read the article

I just read the article and it doesn’t directly answer the question.

Why would you be allowed to have unrecorded conversations in the office? Doesn’t that show the same intent?

Is the default to record all audio conversations in the office? No.

Is the default to record all chat conversations? Yes.

Then Google enacted a policy to have employees turn off the recording of chat conversations if they were going to discuss certain topics.

I've been primarily using end to end encrypted self destructing chats for maybe 20 years at this point, especially for work stuff. Why should other people's poor data hygiene put my data at risk?

Its really simple, if you're in litigation, you are legally obligated not to destroy written records, and produce them based on discovery requests.

If you delete chat, that is destroying written records.

Isn't Google always in litigation?

Are all written records supposed to be preserved when you're in litigation, or just relevant records?

Disclosure issues, and destruction of records, are prominent issues in two UK scandals just now: the Contaminated Blookd Scandal, and the Post Office Horizon scandal.

It's only relevant records, not all records.

"your honor, none of these chats you can't see were relevant."

That's one of the arguments Google tried. Good luck.

So you've been destroying recorded information as a policy; that's fine, but the rule is essentially that if you know you are being sued and your chats are relevant, you need to take steps to stop the destruction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com