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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

At least it isn't retroactive.

I suppose workers need to assume any communication system that is provided by the company may be read at any time by management.

The bummer about this is probably many people use private communications expecting them to stay that way. They don't realize companies like Hipchat do not have architecture to support data impermanence or encryption between parties.

Nor do these companies go out of their way to highlight this, as people probably did not understand the distinction until recently.

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I get what you're saying, but we use HipChat and it's really obvious that it's "your company's chat system." At least, that's how our employees think of it and how it's marketed. I'd be really surprised if someone thought it was more private than their company email address.

Indeed. I suspect companies being started now will opt out of logging more and more. My companies employees work from home the majority of the time. We use Hipchat, Trello, Github, Google Drive, and Email for most of our communications. We limit what we log technically (auto deleted after X days email, no logging on most hipchat channels) and by corporate policy.

We made an active decision to not store / log Hipchat and Email for a few reasons. We have a specific logged Hipchat channels -- but the rest just keep 75 lines for context and that is it. We also never have logged (nor ever will) the 1 on 1 conversations. Employees in a physical location can go outside and rant about a boss, family issue or other random noise -- and this isn't unhealthy, it is normal. We want to encourage open communication and straightforwardness -- and having communications "forgotten" is an important part of that. It also had additional benefits.

1. It limits the nightmare of discovery if we ever get sued, ever word every employee ever said won't be painstakingly scrutinized. Because we want the legal protection, we clearly spell out this privacy in our corporate documents so it is crystal clear to our employees. 2. It allows stuff to be discussed in context and in time and not being picked apart or misunderstood at a later point by other employees. Which encourages honesty and "getting it done". 3. It creates a "separation" of ephemeral communication that have a lower signal to noise ratio (our Hipchat today had many pictures of new desk layouts)... the important data leaves email or Hipchat and makes its way to Trello, Github or Google Drive.

Intelligent corporate policy. Oh how I wish such a marriage of pragmatism and respect for privacy were the norm.

Given how much you rely on SaaS, how do you even know the data is actually gone? Come discovery, I'd expect you'd find its a lot more permanent and exposed than you expect.

Worrying about privacy while using SaaS seems to be missing the forest for a single small tree.

Not really, and there is a ton of case law on the topic. The way (civil) discovery works makes the SaaS concern far less of an issue.

Civil cases are NOT criminal or national security -- this is not the CIA, it is not a secret court, it is not being tapped... it doesn't even rise to the level of a search warrant. It is up to the party being requested on to produce the documents. So, if we get a discovery request, we have to deliver the documents to fulfill it.

For example, we have an automatic email cleanup after 90 days -- both technically, and in policy. This means if we are served with discovery, we can show the policy, show we have taken steps to follow our policy and produce the last 90 days of email. Same goes for Hipchat logs.

Now, they could make some crazy play to extend discovery to Google or Atlassian. There are a couple problems with this, the first of which is such an insanely broad request would be flat out denied as fishing. If it wasn't, they would fight it kicking and screaming because they don't want to be involved in every civil case of every one of their of clients. They then would have to actually have the data, which in the no logging situation, hopefully they never had.

Discovery is often used as a tool of attrition, to wear down the guy with the smaller wallet -- run lean (by policy and design) and if you ever get a request for discovery -- you can fulfill it quickly and completely.

> Now, they could make some crazy play to extend discovery to Google or Atlassian ... Discovery is often used as a tool of attrition, to wear down the guy with the smaller wallet

Not that crazy. If the data exists, the fact that it's on a cloud vendor's backup tape is your problem.

http://searchcio.techtarget.com/report/Avoid-lawsuit-nightma...

On a technical level, I can understand your concerns. I am a developer, and it took me some time to get my head around how it works. But, the bottom line is -- it IS that crazy.

Discovery isn't what you would think from popular culture ... if you served my company with discovery request, "we" (all the lawyers and companies) would have a meeting about it -- you would want to extend your grasp, we would look to shrink it. Most of the time, you would end up with something like "All emails about 'blue paint' between April 2011 and March 2012". Then it is up to ME and my company to find all those emails and provide them to you. Even knowing my email provider would likely be outside the scope. Discovery isn't to FIND a civil issue, it is to find evidence of one already filed issue, so fishing is explicitly not allowed.

Corporate policies are a huge part of the discovery process, what makes it hellish is when you have NO policy around something (like email) because then you have to provide data or prove you don't have it. Our proof is our policy and technical measures.

Our lack of recording data (logging) IS our record management strategy (and a wholly valid one) that massively reduces our costs if we ever get sued.

The "cloud vendor's backup tape" is largely a straw man brought up by engineers rather than lawyers, I think I may have been guilty of bringing it up prior to learning about the discovery process.

All the research I've done says you're wrong: http://www.informationintersection.com/2014/04/discovering-c...

It's more expensive and more complicated, but it's not crazy.

To quote the article "Stay tuned – this is a fight that will happen over and over again, and there will be more guidance provided by the courts in the coming years."

As long as the data exists, there's a very real risk someone is going to want it. If it's managed by an off-the-shelf SaaS vendor, where and how that data exists is entirely outside your control.

That article basically agrees with me. Additionally -- notice how it doesn't point to explicit existing examples, but implies "future problems" -- as did the 2006 article.

"In the vast majority of cases, cloud data that is accessible by the end-user will meet discovery needs and obligations."

and

(regarding going after cloud providers) "Serving a subpoena and ensuring compliance can be challenging and potentially expensive. Whether such efforts are worth the expense and effort will depend on the specific needs of each case. Cloud providers are likely to resist compliance with a subpoena under provisions of Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, otherwise known as the Stored Communications Act (“SCA”)."

Additionally, a director at http://tsemerge.com/ is hardly an unbiased reality oriented 3rd party. The more scared you are -- and the more complex it seems -- the more likely you are to hire them.

"basically" agrees?

As for "Cloud providers are likely to resist", I dare say what's more likely to resist is controlling your own data and simply not having it stored anywhere in the first place.

"I suppose workers need to assume"

We use hipchat at work. I've been assuming since day one my employer can read everything I write. They are _paying_ for it after all.

I manage the Hipchat system at my office. You would be amazed at how few features there are on the admin end. I can only change peoples nicknames, room names, and turn on/off guest access. And upload emoticons. That's the only admin action I ever use.

> They are _paying_ for it after all.

They pay for the toilets too, but that doesn't mean they have surveillance access to everything you do in the bathroom.

Not saying that there might not be a good argument that they ought to have read access to company chats, but it certainly doesn't follow from the fact that they pay for it.

Most big companies have a policy that any thing created on their computers is their property. Similarly, any information created on systems that they are paying for is theirs. If you were creating business value in the bathroom, then they might argue that they have access to it. If it were for labor and privacy laws, they might even have a legal claim to monitoring your brainstorms in the bathroom.

> They pay for the toilets too, but that doesn't mean they have surveillance access to everything you do in the bathroom.

It's only a matter of time before they drug test every flush. As Eric Schmidt said, "if you don't want your urine tested, maybe you shouldn't drink water at work."

Actually, it does follow from the fact they pay for it. If it weren't for explicit rights carved out by privacy laws, they could put cameras in the bathrooms they own.

this.

My friends and I are all using gitter.im to chat now. I just made a private repo on my github account and made them all contributors. Easy peasy.

Also then we're already in the right program to paste code bits around when we need.

Gitter looks awesome - thanks

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