3 ms·
I believe them
by EGreg 3y ago
I believe them
- tsukikage 3y agoThis, but unironically. When a law requires data to be retained for X time, risk-averse companies interpret this as an instruction to immediately delete said data as soon as time X passes, and use automated tools to this end. Sadly, these tools tend to be ad-hoc software written and maintained by internal teams, and thus about as buggy as you'd expect. I've worked in such places, and - in addition to all the other issues - the continuous collective loss of corporate knowledge makes life pretty miserable.
- vxNsr 3y agoAdditionally it looks like they farmed out the project to a third party that was working with FINRA to ensure compliance, apparently that consulting agency failed at their task miserably.
- djbusby 3y agoTask failed successfully.
- nashashmi 3y agobig companies like JPM just don’t have the secret networks of bad actors at an administrative level to carry out nefarious activities like this without someone blowing the whistle.
- ilyt 3y agoOr the data was in just in a directory of some guy that then got shared to everyone else in the project, instead of using per-project share. Then he removed it and everyone else had it gone because of that.
- blitzar 3y agoI consider retaining documents beyond X time to be incompetence at best, negligence at worst. Tech and their, deleted means we keep it forever but mark it as deleted, should take notice.
- duckmysick 3y agoAre there off-the-shelf solutions for legally mandated data retention and deletion? If not, who are the typical go-to players in this area?
- subpar 3y agoWe're in the early days of building this over at phaselab.co. We've been taking more of a data privacy angle, but the product helps folks operationalize all of their data lifecycle / governance tasks. There are some existing players who work with email/comms, but for internal technical systems & user data most orgs are rolling their own deletion pipelines.
- EGreg 3y agoI also meant it unironically, btw. My intuition said the same thing
- TheNewsIsHere 3y agoI’ve been insinuating otherwise playfully in this thread. But, it is unfortunately absolutely realistic that companies are throwing away data the moment they can justify it. Ironically, it’s not the ones we’d like to forget about us most. Data retention is a liability as much as it is an asset, and it’s challenging regardless. If you’re a large enough company you will eventually come to be frustrated by whatever policies you have (either they’re too conservative or too liberal). And understandably when you’ve been caught being shady enough, even an honest deletion will look shady.