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> The real answer is: just fucking use email. I know of at least one large company that forcibly deletes emails older than N months, as part of their legal ret
by DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
> The real answer is: just fucking use email.
I know of at least one large company that forcibly deletes emails older than N months, as part of their legal retention policy. (I'm assuming it means non-retention to limit exposure to lawsuits.)
That would be problematic for persistent documentation.
- munchbunny 6y agoThat sounds like a pathological case. How many companies actually do that?
- res0nat0r 6y agoMost Fortune 500 companies have a document retention policy that every employee needs to read the generic training video/documents on when getting hired and agree to. This sets a general policy of deleting documents/emails/etc after $X days. This is really a CYA policy to purge old conversations if a big lawsuit comes down asking for document retention in relation to some scandal, and if its older than $X days you're covered since your standard legal process was followed.
- sumtechguy 6y agoAlso depending on industry you may by law need to delete things.
- eecks 6y agoWhat is CYA in CYA policy?
- grzm 6y agocover your ass.
- oasisbob 6y agoMany, at least in the US. It's not just companies, government agencies also have similar needs due to sunshine and open-access laws. The alternative to having a document retention policy is to just have employees delete things in an arbitrary manner. It's not just CYA for leaving inconvenient doc lying around, it's also to ensure the proper retention in the event of a preservation order or public records request. Some companies go way further than others. One place I worked included "notes of a personal nature (eg, birthday cards)" in the retention policy and let us keep them for a week or two before destruction.
- benhurmarcel 6y agoThat's weird, my company has the opposite policy. Nothing can be deleted. Employees can delete emails on their side, but the server keeps a copy of every email indefinitely in a "vault". That's for legal purposes apparently.
- Spooky23 6y agoUsually that varies by legal department. Attorneys who sue or investigate people for a living want everything forever, and those who get sued want to delete email before it arrives. Email is a great way to get in trouble, as people tend to say dumb things, even about things that they have nothing to do with!
- legerdemain 6y agoI'm willing to bet money that for every company that deletes emails older than some age also deletes Slack messages, and deletes then sooner. I speak as someone who worked for a company where email got archived and then deleted after 6 months, and currently works at a company where everyone only uses Slack, and Slack is purged after 30 days.
- flerchin 6y agoOur email has a 90 day retention window, and Slack is permanent. We're the largest in our industry.
- legerdemain 6y agoCool! Where should I send bet money?
- flerchin 6y agoMozilla or EFF, your choice. :-D
- legerdemain 6y agoExcellent, $25 sent to EFF!
- grok22 6y agoIsn't that just a company policy? At some-point, the lawyers will get clued-in and require that even on Slack and other company-wide chat there be a limited retention window!
- fencepost 6y agoDo the people who wrote the email policy know that Slack is permanent? That sounds like the kind of thing that could easily be not-understood by legal.
- 6y ago
- astrobe_ 6y agoIf they do store persistent documentation in emails, the problem lies somewhere between the chair and the keyboard. Actually, forced deletion - if users are aware of it of course - is likely to sanitize everyone's practice. Email ain't a backup tool. That's symptomatic of people doing the most silly things and then blame the failures on their tools.
- duckmysick 6y agoThe legal retention policy itself looks persistent. How is it documented?