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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Regulated industries just require saving of communications. It seems like maybe that should be the standard.

Do you think that should extend to recording some or all meetings at a company?

A group of executives meets. Should that meeting be recorded, even if it’s not a “hybrid” meeting and entirely happened in person?

A group of engineers meets. How about that one?

This seems like a hard issue. If the court creates a precedent here, I expect any sensitive discussions that might have any sort of future liability will just go back to verbal conversations (if allowed), and then aren’t we back to where we are today, with no record?

There does seem a big difference between requiring things to be recorded and simply requiring that people don't actively take action to prevent recording.

> Do you think that should extend to recording some or all meetings at a company?

That depends. Did the court order that to happen? (Like in this situation!)

If so, then yes, the company should follow the lawful order of the court.

And if such an order is unlawful, then they should appeal it, and do what the appeal court orders them to do.

actively taking steps to destroy data is very different from simply not creating the data in the first place.

I get that you're eager to create a slippery slope, but you're just showing your ass.

If that becomes true, both remote work AND offshoring may soon be increasingly rare at Google.

> A group of executives meets. Should that meeting be recorded, even if it’s not a “hybrid” meeting and entirely happened in person?

If they are discussing matters related to the company, then it should at least be minuted.

The counterpart to "don't take notes on a criminal conspiracy" is "why, if you're not involved in a criminal conspiracy, are you not taking notes?"

(This has become absolutely endemic in UK government where all kinds of things happen in encrypted whatsapp groups .. which are then selectively leaked by one of the attendees.)

> Regulated industries just require saving of communications

This isn't a regulated industries issue: all parties to actual or reasonably anticipated litigation are required to preserve evidence.

That is not the same thing. Stock brokerages are simply required to store every bit of written communication for years, for example. As I understand it there are also circumstances where they’re forced to record things if they’re not written.

Not as a “reasonably anticipated” but just always.

I think companies that manage lots of private user data should probably be held to the same standards.

Yes, both things exist. But the Google issue being discussed is not about being in a highly-regulated industry, it's about reasonably anticipated litigation where they had actual notice of an investigation of particular issues with the potential for litigation, and even an explicit notice that this triggered a requirement to preserve all relevant communication and documents, and there specific actions with that knowledge.

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