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Everything you do on a computer is recorded, at least ephemerally, in the computer memory. Does deleting stuff from the memory count as destroying evidence? If
by vjk800 4y ago
Everything you do on a computer is recorded, at least ephemerally, in the computer memory. Does deleting stuff from the memory count as destroying evidence? If not, how is it different from deleting stuff from somewhere else? I mean, deleting information that is not used is part of how computer operate, if you're going to disallow that, you better have a pretty huge tech infrastructure to store all those memory dumps from every workstation Google has every second or so.
- dxdm 4y ago> Does deleting stuff from the memory count as destroying evidence? Maybe? The line is more blurry here, but there are probably cases where it's more or less easy to make the distinction. If data is recorded on a permanent medium, it can be arbitrarily retrieved, an explicit delete operation is needed to get rid of it, and this deletion can be scheduled to happen at an arbitrary time - that might easily be understood as "destroying evidence". If you want asynchronous communication, you will need to produce records of some kind, which can be evidence. That's nothing new. Maybe if you have a system where the information must be exchanged live and falls off a cliff immediately no matter if it was observed or not, say, like a video conferencing tool - I wonder how the courts see that. It gets much closer to an interesting edge case than something with a 24-hour retention policy.
- tantalor 4y agoWhat if the 24 hour chats are only stored in RAM? That's not permanent.
- polotics 4y agoRAM is permanent as long as you don't pull the plug. If you've been told to preserve evidence, and still pull the plug, then you did not do what you were told to do.
- tantalor 4y agoSilly analogy: person on lit hold writes a message in the sand on a beach with the tide out. Are they obligated to preserve the message before the tide erases it naturally?
- eropple 4y agoIf a judge thinks so, yes. So you should err on the side of caution, while being a good and ethical participant in the judicial process, and take a picture of it. If this would be detrimental to your case, perhaps stop doing shady shit.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 3np 4y agoYou have constructed a hypothetical case where the answer would likely depend on facts and circumstances beyond what's written. That such cases can exist doesn't mean it's not clear-cut here. In the vast majority of cases, two engineers will agree on the question "is this data persisted or ephemeral" and the fact that the line is blurry doesn't mean we can't know when it's been crossed.