I also worked at a fang company. When I was there they decided after losing a big govt case they would auto-delete your email after some number of months, like

I also worked at a fang company. When I was there they decided after losing a big govt case they would auto-delete your email after some number of months, like 6 months, plus they would limit your email storage to a small amount to force you to constantly delete things to send and receive email. They were careful to explain it wasn't to hide anything, it was IT efficiency or some bs. It was an exchange system, so you had to constantly delete your old email to free up space. Then the final piece of the puzzle was most of us were semi-randomly under the auspices of a giant lawsuit (imagine 1000 random developers in a division, everyone employed on xyz date is included). They told us to save relevant email to the lawsuit, without providing us any mechanism to do this, or clarifying what email is relevant. This was Microsoft 20 years ago. They also told us about the cc the lawyer trick and that it wouldn't work. It was extremely clear they were trying to avoid recording conversations. It's many years later and my current employer auto-deletes slack messages after a week (so everyone copies them to google docs to save things). We waste a ton of time trying to save off important things. At the same time many many important communications seem to happen on slack. Plus we have zoom meetings, we can record them, but they get auto-deleted after some number of months. We incentivized the lawyers to waste time of the engineers.