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If you read the judgement, the judge doesn't really see any distinction between "can technically record" and "must record", with only financial burdens being ac
by revelio 4y ago
If you read the judgement, the judge doesn't really see any distinction between "can technically record" and "must record", with only financial burdens being accepted as a justification for not doing so. The reasoning goes, because Chat could be recorded, it should have been because it's electronic communication.
But this logic can extend to any form of communication that could technically be recorded. It means that, by extension, all video calls and phone calls should be recorded too if you can afford to do so (but it's cheap, so you can). And that in turn means that the cost of remote work just exploded because many meetings that a non-remote company would have in an office, face to face, should now be recorded and preserved if any of the participants are under a litigation hold. But as the employees testified, at a big company like Google basically in a given discussion at least someone is always under litigation hold. So that means every meeting or phone call may have to be recorded. And that in turn means the discovery cost imposed on companies that allow remote work will be much higher.
Did companies just get a justification for forcing everyone back to the office? It does seem so. Maybe even for reducing the international presence of teams even when they're in the office.
The judge doesn't spell out this small extension of his argument. It seems he was mostly pissed off by Google employees obfuscating about the issue and lying to the court (no excuse for that). But having read it, where's the limit? The aspects of law they're citing talk about "electronically stored information". If not using a technical ability to record is interpreted as the same thing as destroying stored information, then the retention procedures at almost every company are going to be found in non-compliance simply because video calls, phone calls and so on are so often not being recorded.
- alach11 4y agoI agree with all your analysis here. This judgement has far reaching consequences. It's reminiscent of discussions around MGM using automated facial recognition to ban people from venues. Our legal framework was set up with an implicit assumption that identifying people and banning them from a business is hard to scale. As soon as you can do it en-masse for thousands of employees of a rival business, the calculus might need to change. Similarly, our legal framework around the retention of corporate communications was originally framed around only official (and relatively uncommon) communications like memos being on the record. Then email. Now chat. Soon all meetings and phone calls? Each step here is a major step-change that requires careful consideration!
- AlbertCory 4y agoAh, you're expecting the law to make sense? Telephone conversations, or the conversation in a meeting, are not "expected" to be recorded. Yes, they could be, but they're not, so it doesn't matter. Your logical extensions are kinda irrelevant. A chat is recorded, on the server. It isn't deleted after people receive it. Google, and lots of companies, interpret "off the record" to mean that it's deleted after a period.
- singleshot_ 4y agoCitation for any of this?
- revelio 4y agoThe law should make sense, and your argument is exactly the same as the one Google used with chats, there isn't any difference. It could easily be argued that phone calls are "recorded" by the VOIP systems. Especially because off the record means there was no 24 hour retention period and the messages were never recorded to begin with. You're mixing up the default behaviour of "history on" (24 hour retention) with "history off" (no retention.