If you’re ordered to retain communications, sure. And in a civil court, it’s fair to conclude adversely if a party’s messages disappear suspiciously. But by the government? No.
They weren't always using Signal. They had many thousands of emails and other communications that were preserved and used as evidence.
That seems wrong.
Yes, how else could it work? For example if you have a policy to destroy CCTV footage at the end of the day then it’s not illegal to do that. If you have a policy to keep CCTV footage but when the police come and ask you some questions you delete it because you know that it contains evidence of a crime, that’s destruction of evidence. It’s not illegal to delete things, otherwise the world would run out of storage, it’s illegal to delete things to knowingly impede an investigation.
I'm never talking to anyone over insecure channels again.
You can and should do this. No one will punish you for it in court unless you refuse to give them evidence that they have legally obtained.
I'm not sure why this is so complicated for you.
Let's say you murder someone with a knife, and you keep that bloody knife in a safe labeled, "Potential Evidence of Murder". A judge orders you to open the safe, and instead you incinerate it and everything inside it.
You wouldn't be punished for keeping your jewels in other safes. You'd be punished for committing a crime and then preventing a court from getting the evidence.
- publicly traded
- more powerful than many entire countries
- committing crimes
...when those executives explicitly switched to disappearing messaging in order to cover up those crimes?
Context matters. I don't want to live in a world where people can avoid prosecution just by deleting evidence.
It seems to me that we can, have, and should punish people for success if that success is likely to lead to well known kinds of market failure, and that such a policy is generally non-controversial outside of the most extreme forms of libertarian political philosophies (which unfortunately, are disproportionately prevalent in big tech and likely to get the whole industry in serious hot water).
Certainly, you could make the same "natural monopoly" argument against just about every serious anti-trust action that has taken place in the past. It didn't work then and I don't think its going to work now.
Pretending that closed platforms that exist on computer networks (and are not themselves networks) somehow makes this all different is not very convincing. Network effects, as we've come to understand the term, are not new, and have existed before computer networks. To the extent they exist, it's evidence of need for intervention because of a clear failure of a market to self regulate (what some may call a "natural" or just a regular monopoly) and maintain a competitive market, not evidence that everything is okay.
I also seriously take issue with the idea that Google provides an "essential service". Power, food, water, and you could make an argument for computer and communications infrastructure, are "essential". Google search is not. If it disappeared, society would soldier on and we would all be fine. At worst it would be a minor inconvenience for users and a headache for IT departments and developers.
I also offered an alternative solution to private interests capturing natural monopolies: the state subsidizing a public option that can do that. My preference would be state funding for the development of open source software and decentralized platforms that can substitute for proprietary software and centrally managed platforms.
In fact, the state is ideally situated to fund this kind of public goods development, as it is the only legal entity with a broad enough tax collective apparatus to capture the gains from such investments.
As for essential/non-essential, perhaps you're right in terms of terminology. In any case, internet search is a widely used and extremely valuable service that enhances quality of life.
>such a policy is generally non-controversial outside of the most extreme forms of libertarian political philosophies (which unfortunately, are disproportionately prevalent in big tech and likely to get the whole industry in serious hot water).
Something being non-controversial doesn't make it right. It was uncontroversial anti-libertarian ideology that found a way to justify imprisoning hundreds of thousands of elderly people for a year during the COVID pandemic:
Agree. But they shouldn’t be denied any protections we plebeians would expect and be afforded.
> The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined 11 Wall Street banks and brokerages more than $1.8 billion in a long-anticipated move to curb finance employees’ use of unapproved messaging platforms and companies’ failures to keep accurate records of those communications, the regulators said Tuesday.
But it's not a "cool" tech company so you don't hear about it on HN.
No airplanes here but the same shady evil practice.
This is why they probably removed the "don't be evil" from their code of conduct.
Not for nothing, but as a paramedic, the number of patients who've sworn black and blue that they're "no longer suicidal", "no longer a threat", "if anything happens to me, it definitely wasn't suicide" who ... went on to attempt or commit suicide in very short order is non-trivial.
I don't think the executives need to do anything themselves at a company like Google -- whether it is their (managed) phone or laptop, likely the IT would install and set up these things and everything would be ready to use. If not they have assistants who can do the chores.
I use FaceTime Audio frequently for calls. Once I was asked to testify in respect of an investment fraud I prompted my firm to report. I got grilled for not being able to provide complete call logs. My concern is criminalising incomplete records creates the precedent of requiring them at all times.
If you know how to access these records from a year ago, I’M genuinely curious for the answer, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure that out.
For what it’s worth anecdotally, I have info in my call log going back to 2022. If you have local backups via iTunes and/or Files app, you may also be able to find call logs. Apps such as iMazing Phone Evidence and other tools from that company are able to explore local backups and physically connected devices.
Recents only goes back a few days. I don’t see Phone or FaceTime as options in my iCloud back-up, and there is no folder in Files corresponding to them. (Are you referring to iCloud Drive? I don’t have it enabled.)
Granted, there is a good chance I disabled something somewhere, because I’m not a fan of a tech company having more information than it needs on me.
> I don’t see Phone or FaceTime as options in my iCloud back-up
It’s under Settings, then the top navigation [your Apple ID name] section above Airplane Mode which is the Apple ID settings -> iCloud -> Apps using iCloud -> Show All.
This Apple Support page may be helpful to you and others.
> Locate backups of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
> Find a list of your iOS or iPadOS backups on your Mac, PC, and iOS or iPadOS device. Learn how to delete backups, copy them, and more.
This is civil court.