6 ms·

Yeah, FAANG gang has no idea the level of surveillance and record keeping that bank/fund/wall st tech is under. I worked at one shop that if you said "call my

Yeah, FAANG gang has no idea the level of surveillance and record keeping that bank/fund/wall st tech is under. I worked at one shop that if you said "call my cell" in a slack to someone, you'd get a call from compliance within days ask to explain why you did this, what the conversation was about, why it wasn't on a work phone.. and to never, ever, ever do it again... because you know we are watching, so we will find you.

grepfru_it 4y ago
Every bank I’ve worked at issued a company cell phone. To be pedantic if you say call my personal cell, then compliance will be on you like flies on poop
- steveBK123 4y ago
  I said something like "call my cell at __" and put my personal cell number, but didn't say "personal". Which gives you an idea of the level of monitoring they are doing to tie that together probably automatically given how quickly I was called. And this was almost 10 years ago. I'm also old enough to recall the little background hum & beep the bank landlines used to make when you were on a recorded line.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    "Almost 10 years ago" was before Slack launched :-) We're you on AOL IM?
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Whatever crap MSFT had before teams
      - mjcl 4y ago
        Good 'ol OCS/Lync/S4B
- aikinai 4y ago
  Are you allowed to have in-person meetings? Do you have to record and preserve them? If you are allowed to be off the record only in person, this seems like the perfect commercial real estate subsidy program from the federal government.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Yes but there's almost always someone on zoom/conference line in the meeting, which is recorded, so.. The penalties are so stiff for a lot of infractions, there is far less attempts to workaround the letter of the rules than you would immediately expect. There's also classes of in-person meetings with externals that you need pre-approval permission to attend and to write up what was discussed after the fact. Like people at asset management firms attending a dinner with a broker. Another example, at a hedge fund I worked, emails, meetings or phone calls to public companies required pre-approval from compliance, and for them to be on the email or call. The emails would also require a preface reminding the moron on the other side that you are a hedge fund and they should not provide you with any material non-public info.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I can only think to myself, well, yeah, that's what that industry gets for all of the bullshit shenanigans that have been pulled in the past. Is everyone commit flat out illegal shit like Wolf Of Wall St? No. But this is the only way to allow any semblance of trust by anyone. That being said, I personally believe every company if finance/banking is doing something shady somewhere, even if only a small number of people are involved. There is no trust whatsoever from me to that industry
      - steveBK123 4y ago
        cool story, given the left-right populist-progressive agreement on regulating big tech.. its coming for the HN crowd next :-)
        labster 4y ago
Waterluvian 4y ago
Would work phones be recorded or just have the call numbers/times recorded?
- steveBK123 4y ago
  All phone conversations are recorded and kept for at least 7 years. This is in addition to all email and slack/IM messages.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    I feel like it might be really awesome to have that complete firewall between work and life comms.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Reportedly, many firms had an SSL MITM server in place and also recorded your private Facebook messages if you made them from the office wifi. Signal conversations may have been safe, but that's it.
  - zaphirplane 4y ago
    The work Android or iPhone records calls? Is it even possible
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      It's all just data, isn't it? Route it all through VoIP and record it there? Maybe theres some bank-compliance phone vendor that operates its own MVNO and does the recording for you? here's something like that - https://www.teleware.com/products/mobile-voice-recording/ https://www.teleware.com/products/mobile-voice-recording/
      - wil421 4y ago
        No it’s not possible in the way or manner you described unless it’s an office phone. Banks aren’t creating a super secret MVNO to comply with regulations and the telcos aren’t cutting breaks for a bank or a 3rd party spy network. I’d imagine saving all employees cellphone calls for 7 years is a very expensive project.
wanderingmind 4y ago
Wondering which official phone was used to get AAA ratings for the crap synthetic CDOs during 08 crisis.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Not a great example for nefarious off the records communication & coordination, as it wasn't required for this to occur. CDO credit ratings were a perverse incentive race to the bottom in terms of quality, because it was issuer-paid. The ratings agencies essentially bid on future business with the banks by issuing rosier ratings than their competitors. Also, they paid billions in fine settlements after the fact. The record keeping likely contributed to them being able to piece together the agencies becoming more and more lenient, and the internal dialogue between analysts & sales.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    > CDO credit ratings were a perverse incentive race to the bottom in terms of quality, because it was issuer-paid. Yet this remains unchanged.
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Right, still stupid to be issuer paid, but there's also not a lot of great alternatives I suppose. Ideally it would be buyer paid, but then you have a chicken&egg problem that buyers don't want to pay for ratings on securities they don't buy, and they don't know which to buy if they aren't rated yet. Security purchasers were obviously doing insufficient due diligence & research on products, taking ratings at face value. It's like if you saw CNBC mention some upgrade of Rivian to a "buy rating" by Goldman, and said "OK then I am buying it", without doing any research. Anyway, some structure was put in place by the government settlements. For example in Moodys government they agreed to: * Separation of Moody’s commercial and credit rating functions by excluding analytical personnel from any commercial related discussions and excluding personnel responsible for commercial functions from determining credit ratings or developing rating methodologies; * Changes to ensure that specified personnel are not compensated on the basis of the company’s financial performance; and a few other things The separation of concerns seems similar to the Dotcom implosion era settlements to how equity research could be paid, and that they had to be firewalls off from the parts of the bank bidding on equity/debt/loan offerings with the companies that research reports were being written on. Probably the biggest outcome was that the market now understood credit rating agencies are barely worth the bytes they are recorded in, and they are taken with large grains of salt now. So far from perfect, but also far from the narrative of "nothing changed".. like much in life.
shadowgovt 4y ago
And it wouldn't take too many law changes to put FAANG under similar scrutiny. Seems like it might be time.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  It would be difficult just to target FAANGs. If the law changed to include them, it would probably include everyone else as well. They aren't in any activity that is regulated by a special agency like banks/traders are.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Hypothetically, we could base it on revenue.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      You think it’s a good idea to give the government more surveillance power?
      - sitkack 4y ago
        Over corporations, yes please!
        scarface74 4y ago
        Yes because the minute that someone from the “other” (whichever side you don’t like) party gets in control do you think they are going to do things that you want? Desantis just tried to push through a law that said you have to register with the state if you report on politicians. Do you like that proposed law? Do you want the government to have access to all communications between you and your coworkers? Do you want to be questioned every time that you tell a coworker over Slack “maybe we should talk about this at lunch?” It amazes me that people want the only organization that has a “monopoly on violence” to have more power.
master_crab 4y ago
No. You are allowed to communicate by voice and it isn’t recorded and compliance will allow it. However it depends what you are doing. If you are trading, it better be on a recorded line. See FINRA Regulatory Notice 20-16 for reference. In fact, many Zoom conversations are expressly forbidden from being recorded at many financial firms. Again, that’s because no one is using zoom to make trades so there isn’t a requirement to record them and financial firms also don’t want to have to pay to keep things stored just so some lawyer can hit them with discovery. A big current issue is when you use written correspondence that is not part of a system of record. See Finra Regulatory Notice 17-18 for details on that.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  That makes no sense. Why is trading via Zoom impossible, voice maybe, and text mandatory?
  - master_crab 4y ago
    And trading via WhatsApp is also possible. And also illegal The point of the regulation isn’t to cover every conceivable alternative. The point is to specify what avenue you can use to accomplish a task in a regulated manner
    - johannes1234321 4y ago
      ... and by the company enforcing it the way they enforce it, they can prove the employee bypassed the rules knowingly and purposely without the company being at fault.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    > Why is trading via Zoom impossible, voice maybe, and text mandatory? Because trading conversations have to be recorded (legally). It's easy for corporate policy to say "we don't record Zooms, (therefore) you cannot trade over Zoom". It's also easy to say "we record all text communications, (therefore) you can trade over text". Meanwhile, the phone rules predated any other modern form of communication so they have the complexity of "sometimes record and trade, sometimes don't" grandfathered in.
ttttt444yeak 4y ago
The lack of any kind of effective legal standards in the tech industry is batshit crazy considering the the primary business model and what they are investing in. Its an actual tragedy and by far the thing the scares me the most about living in the US.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  I would go with the police, health care 'system' or the curiously large proportion of the population who think qanon > democracy, but you do you, I guess.
MertsA 4y ago
I work at a big tech company (not Google) and this flagrant contempt for the legal hold is absolutely shocking to me. We're also under a legal hold. It has nothing to do with anything relating to my work. I will never have anything responsive to any kind of discovery request, I don't even work on a product team, only infra. The company is preserving everything that could even hypothetically be responsive to some future discovery request. If I need to reimage my work laptop, I can't, current company guidance is to return the laptop to IT and get a new machine because they need to preserve any data on the laptop. Email is being archived, there's regular communications about making sure everyone from top to bottom knows to preserve anything tangentially related to the legal hold. During yearly compliance training one thing that was stressed was not to mark anything A/C Priv unless it actually was. They made sure to call out that including someone from legal in an email chain does not make it A/C Priv and not to try anything like that. At the time I thought it was silly that the training went over such obvious things as "don't commit white collar crimes" in essence but apparently that's not how they do things at Google. I just can't wrap my head around why any of the many different people involved could ever look at what they were doing and think "yes, this is fine, I should continue this behavior". WTAF.

grepfru_it 4y ago

Every bank I’ve worked at issued a company cell phone. To be pedantic if you say call my personal cell, then compliance will be on you like flies on poop

steveBK123 4y ago
I said something like "call my cell at __" and put my personal cell number, but didn't say "personal". Which gives you an idea of the level of monitoring they are doing to tie that together probably automatically given how quickly I was called. And this was almost 10 years ago. I'm also old enough to recall the little background hum & beep the bank landlines used to make when you were on a recorded line.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  "Almost 10 years ago" was before Slack launched :-) We're you on AOL IM?
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Whatever crap MSFT had before teams
    - mjcl 4y ago
      Good 'ol OCS/Lync/S4B
aikinai 4y ago
Are you allowed to have in-person meetings? Do you have to record and preserve them? If you are allowed to be off the record only in person, this seems like the perfect commercial real estate subsidy program from the federal government.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Yes but there's almost always someone on zoom/conference line in the meeting, which is recorded, so.. The penalties are so stiff for a lot of infractions, there is far less attempts to workaround the letter of the rules than you would immediately expect. There's also classes of in-person meetings with externals that you need pre-approval permission to attend and to write up what was discussed after the fact. Like people at asset management firms attending a dinner with a broker. Another example, at a hedge fund I worked, emails, meetings or phone calls to public companies required pre-approval from compliance, and for them to be on the email or call. The emails would also require a preface reminding the moron on the other side that you are a hedge fund and they should not provide you with any material non-public info.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I can only think to myself, well, yeah, that's what that industry gets for all of the bullshit shenanigans that have been pulled in the past. Is everyone commit flat out illegal shit like Wolf Of Wall St? No. But this is the only way to allow any semblance of trust by anyone. That being said, I personally believe every company if finance/banking is doing something shady somewhere, even if only a small number of people are involved. There is no trust whatsoever from me to that industry
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      cool story, given the left-right populist-progressive agreement on regulating big tech.. its coming for the HN crowd next :-)
      - labster 4y ago

Waterluvian 4y ago

Would work phones be recorded or just have the call numbers/times recorded?

steveBK123 4y ago
All phone conversations are recorded and kept for at least 7 years. This is in addition to all email and slack/IM messages.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  I feel like it might be really awesome to have that complete firewall between work and life comms.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Reportedly, many firms had an SSL MITM server in place and also recorded your private Facebook messages if you made them from the office wifi. Signal conversations may have been safe, but that's it.
- zaphirplane 4y ago
  The work Android or iPhone records calls? Is it even possible
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    It's all just data, isn't it? Route it all through VoIP and record it there? Maybe theres some bank-compliance phone vendor that operates its own MVNO and does the recording for you? here's something like that - https://www.teleware.com/products/mobile-voice-recording/ https://www.teleware.com/products/mobile-voice-recording/
    - wil421 4y ago
      No it’s not possible in the way or manner you described unless it’s an office phone. Banks aren’t creating a super secret MVNO to comply with regulations and the telcos aren’t cutting breaks for a bank or a 3rd party spy network. I’d imagine saving all employees cellphone calls for 7 years is a very expensive project.

wanderingmind 4y ago

Wondering which official phone was used to get AAA ratings for the crap synthetic CDOs during 08 crisis.

steveBK123 4y ago
Not a great example for nefarious off the records communication & coordination, as it wasn't required for this to occur. CDO credit ratings were a perverse incentive race to the bottom in terms of quality, because it was issuer-paid. The ratings agencies essentially bid on future business with the banks by issuing rosier ratings than their competitors. Also, they paid billions in fine settlements after the fact. The record keeping likely contributed to them being able to piece together the agencies becoming more and more lenient, and the internal dialogue between analysts & sales.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > CDO credit ratings were a perverse incentive race to the bottom in terms of quality, because it was issuer-paid. Yet this remains unchanged.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Right, still stupid to be issuer paid, but there's also not a lot of great alternatives I suppose. Ideally it would be buyer paid, but then you have a chicken&egg problem that buyers don't want to pay for ratings on securities they don't buy, and they don't know which to buy if they aren't rated yet. Security purchasers were obviously doing insufficient due diligence & research on products, taking ratings at face value. It's like if you saw CNBC mention some upgrade of Rivian to a "buy rating" by Goldman, and said "OK then I am buying it", without doing any research. Anyway, some structure was put in place by the government settlements. For example in Moodys government they agreed to: * Separation of Moody’s commercial and credit rating functions by excluding analytical personnel from any commercial related discussions and excluding personnel responsible for commercial functions from determining credit ratings or developing rating methodologies; * Changes to ensure that specified personnel are not compensated on the basis of the company’s financial performance; and a few other things The separation of concerns seems similar to the Dotcom implosion era settlements to how equity research could be paid, and that they had to be firewalls off from the parts of the bank bidding on equity/debt/loan offerings with the companies that research reports were being written on. Probably the biggest outcome was that the market now understood credit rating agencies are barely worth the bytes they are recorded in, and they are taken with large grains of salt now. So far from perfect, but also far from the narrative of "nothing changed".. like much in life.

shadowgovt 4y ago

And it wouldn't take too many law changes to put FAANG under similar scrutiny. Seems like it might be time.

seanmcdirmid 4y ago
It would be difficult just to target FAANGs. If the law changed to include them, it would probably include everyone else as well. They aren't in any activity that is regulated by a special agency like banks/traders are.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Hypothetically, we could base it on revenue.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You think it’s a good idea to give the government more surveillance power?
    - sitkack 4y ago
      Over corporations, yes please!
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Yes because the minute that someone from the “other” (whichever side you don’t like) party gets in control do you think they are going to do things that you want? Desantis just tried to push through a law that said you have to register with the state if you report on politicians. Do you like that proposed law? Do you want the government to have access to all communications between you and your coworkers? Do you want to be questioned every time that you tell a coworker over Slack “maybe we should talk about this at lunch?” It amazes me that people want the only organization that has a “monopoly on violence” to have more power.

master_crab 4y ago

No. You are allowed to communicate by voice and it isn’t recorded and compliance will allow it. However it depends what you are doing. If you are trading, it better be on a recorded line. See FINRA Regulatory Notice 20-16 for reference. In fact, many Zoom conversations are expressly forbidden from being recorded at many financial firms. Again, that’s because no one is using zoom to make trades so there isn’t a requirement to record them and financial firms also don’t want to have to pay to keep things stored just so some lawyer can hit them with discovery. A big current issue is when you use written correspondence that is not part of a system of record. See Finra Regulatory Notice 17-18 for details on that.

hgsgm 4y ago
That makes no sense. Why is trading via Zoom impossible, voice maybe, and text mandatory?
- master_crab 4y ago
  And trading via WhatsApp is also possible. And also illegal The point of the regulation isn’t to cover every conceivable alternative. The point is to specify what avenue you can use to accomplish a task in a regulated manner
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    ... and by the company enforcing it the way they enforce it, they can prove the employee bypassed the rules knowingly and purposely without the company being at fault.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > Why is trading via Zoom impossible, voice maybe, and text mandatory? Because trading conversations have to be recorded (legally). It's easy for corporate policy to say "we don't record Zooms, (therefore) you cannot trade over Zoom". It's also easy to say "we record all text communications, (therefore) you can trade over text". Meanwhile, the phone rules predated any other modern form of communication so they have the complexity of "sometimes record and trade, sometimes don't" grandfathered in.

ttttt444yeak 4y ago

The lack of any kind of effective legal standards in the tech industry is batshit crazy considering the the primary business model and what they are investing in. Its an actual tragedy and by far the thing the scares me the most about living in the US.

sdenton4 4y ago
I would go with the police, health care 'system' or the curiously large proportion of the population who think qanon > democracy, but you do you, I guess.

MertsA 4y ago

I work at a big tech company (not Google) and this flagrant contempt for the legal hold is absolutely shocking to me. We're also under a legal hold. It has nothing to do with anything relating to my work. I will never have anything responsive to any kind of discovery request, I don't even work on a product team, only infra. The company is preserving everything that could even hypothetically be responsive to some future discovery request. If I need to reimage my work laptop, I can't, current company guidance is to return the laptop to IT and get a new machine because they need to preserve any data on the laptop. Email is being archived, there's regular communications about making sure everyone from top to bottom knows to preserve anything tangentially related to the legal hold. During yearly compliance training one thing that was stressed was not to mark anything A/C Priv unless it actually was. They made sure to call out that including someone from legal in an email chain does not make it A/C Priv and not to try anything like that. At the time I thought it was silly that the training went over such obvious things as "don't commit white collar crimes" in essence but apparently that's not how they do things at Google. I just can't wrap my head around why any of the many different people involved could ever look at what they were doing and think "yes, this is fine, I should continue this behavior". WTAF.