4 ms·

I'm struggle to understand a situation where that would ever be justifiable. If they have a good reason for deleting messages, that's bad. If their legal team

I'm struggle to understand a situation where that would ever be justifiable. If they have a good reason for deleting messages, that's bad. If their legal team is overzealous and that power is unchecked, that's also bad.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
A situation where the corporation is engaged in embarrassing or illegal shit and they're using Slack so they can do all the above-board, non-embarassing stuff via email that would show up in discovery. 5 day retention is so wildly impractical, it's a tacit admission the corp is up to something. Gives legal time to drag anything out in court until it's all gone. By the time the other party learns they have the 5-day retention, it's too late.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >By the time the other party learns they have the 5-day retention, it's too late. Anyone hoping to use this trick to pull off the perfect caper will be dismayed to discover that not only is the other party allowed to talk to your employees, human testimony is admissible. The idea of trying to make the past go away after five days, by deleting the digital records, reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1494/ https://xkcd.com/1494/. I'd also like to point out that this thread - where we're discussing the pros and cons of a technique for getting rid of inconvenient records, is itself the kind of awkward talk that, if found in a Slack channel during discovery, would turn in to something else entirely in the hands of some other company's lawyers. That sheds an interesting light on these retention policies.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    If it wasn't for HN, I don't think that XKCD would have been anything more to me than a joke about programmers enjoying coming up with "cool hacks". But in the comments here I far too often find people trying to come up with legal loopholes that assume the system is perfectly rigid.

4 ms·

I'm struggle to understand a situation where that would ever be justifiable. If they have a good reason for deleting messages, that's bad. If their legal team

by underwater 5y ago

KennyBlanken 5y ago
A situation where the corporation is engaged in embarrassing or illegal shit and they're using Slack so they can do all the above-board, non-embarassing stuff via email that would show up in discovery. 5 day retention is so wildly impractical, it's a tacit admission the corp is up to something. Gives legal time to drag anything out in court until it's all gone. By the time the other party learns they have the 5-day retention, it's too late.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >By the time the other party learns they have the 5-day retention, it's too late. Anyone hoping to use this trick to pull off the perfect caper will be dismayed to discover that not only is the other party allowed to talk to your employees, human testimony is admissible. The idea of trying to make the past go away after five days, by deleting the digital records, reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1494/ https://xkcd.com/1494/. I'd also like to point out that this thread - where we're discussing the pros and cons of a technique for getting rid of inconvenient records, is itself the kind of awkward talk that, if found in a Slack channel during discovery, would turn in to something else entirely in the hands of some other company's lawyers. That sheds an interesting light on these retention policies.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    If it wasn't for HN, I don't think that XKCD would have been anything more to me than a joke about programmers enjoying coming up with "cool hacks". But in the comments here I far too often find people trying to come up with legal loopholes that assume the system is perfectly rigid.