6 ms·

What they mean is _don't delete chats after an investigation has started._ What sensible people do is have a retention policy of not keeping chats longer than,

What they mean is _don't delete chats after an investigation has started._ What sensible people do is have a retention policy of not keeping chats longer than, say seven days. I know what you're thinking, "Slack is our project archive." If that's actually true, .gov investigations are the LEAST of your problems.

jgalt212 3y ago
> What sensible people do is have a retention policy of not keeping chats longer than, say seven days. or seven years if the SEC is watching over you.
gherkinnn 3y ago
Retaining messages for no longer than a week or two would act as a forcing function to keep project management and comms sane.
- wharvle 3y ago
  True in theory. In practice, I’ve never seen a “more-correct” system actually replace the value of long-lived chat channels and a culture of discussing things out in the open on those channels. Long-lived chats don’t replace documentation and project management, but I’ve yet to see those replace the value of long-lived chats. Now, it probably could be replaced by companies putting project management in a non-hellish tool that’s close to the code and has a pleasant chatting-about-issues experience and low structure so you don’t feel like you’re knocking over some PM’s sand castle if you mess with it (so NOT jira, asana, et c) but I’ve never experienced a company that does that. Communicating in the PM tools is always terrible.
- ParetoOptimal 3y ago
  Even though I commented up thread that not having logs for more than 7 days would be horrible for an employee, I don't necessarily disagree fully with this statement. It would ideally force employees to take notes and keep comms/project management sane, however I'm more likely to believe people would just get used to finding an easier workaround or guessing.
dylan604 3y ago
Wouldn't any chance to retention policies be a bit of a possible canary trap?
- eschneider 3y ago
  Not really an issue. When you're in a situation where you need to retain data for legal reasons, You TELL people that, so they don't inadvertently destroy the data. It's the opposite of a secret.
  - mlhpdx 3y ago
    And, there is software for it that automates sending and getting confirmation the notification has been received and understood. One example: https://www.exterro.com/e-discovery-software/legal-hold https://www.exterro.com/e-discovery-software/legal-hold
lxgr 3y ago
It's still bizarre to me that this has become the industry standard in the US. Sure, it's all legal and perfectly reasonable at the micro level considering that every stored email increases the legal fees (due to making discovery more expensive during any hypothetical future lawsuit), but at a macro level, the outcome "companies legally delete all written communications as soon as feasible" seems baffling. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the financial industry, where regulators effectively require recording every single bit of business communication (by taking a very liberal interpretation of some quite old law, as far as I understand), written or spoken (unless it was in person, of course), and under threat of massive fines. It seems to me like there should be some pragmatic middle ground somewhere between these two extremes?
- eschneider 3y ago
  The "companies legally delete all written communications as soon as feasible" outcome isn't (mostly) because companies are trying to hide illegal shit. It's because when you get sued for whatever, and your email/chat/whatever get subpoenaed, there's going to be who-knows-how-much embarrassing personal gossip in there, too and that just makes folks look bad. The easiest way to avoid that (and other forms of embarrassment) is to just not keep that stuff around. If it's policy, it's legal. You can't go around and delete the stuff after the fact.
  - mattmcknight 3y ago
    It's also just a massive time/money sink to have your own legal team review all of that stuff. You don't want to send anything to another party before you have reviewed it. In addition, there are often conflicting rules there, where there is private information of unrelated parties in the messages, so the review process just becomes unmanageable if it is an archive over a long period of time. Meanwhile, we now have people putting stuff into their own personal information management systems, training various models on the data, etc. When the company ceases to be a valuable library of the information necessary to do your job, people start specifically archiving things that might be useful at some point in the future, and the discovery process becomes unbounded.
paulddraper 3y ago
> I know what you're thinking, "Slack is our project archive." If that's actually true, .gov investigations are the LEAST of your problems. I'm thinking Slack is my conversation archive.
- scruple 3y ago
  We must not have the same employer. Our private message retention rate must be 30 days. It's fucking infuriating but I also believe it's directly correlated to TFA.
- Karellen 3y ago
  Why do you have a "conversation archive"? Wouldn't you consider it really fucking weird if every time you had an informal, in-person discussion with a friend, or maybe a partner, or even a co-worker, that they insisted on writing everything both of you said in a notebook to keep a permanent record of it, in case they wanted to call you out on something you kind of blurted out without too much thought ten years from now, or to be able to turn it over to the authorities if they ever (incorrectly?) thought you might be implicated in something dodgy? Or for it to be available for someone to steal and/or make copies of? They can never just have a chat with you? Shoot the shit and put the world to rights, without you keeping meticulous records of every goddamn word they said off the cuff? You don't think that, maybe, the more our real lives move online, the more that that kind of friendly, informal, ephemeral conversation ought to be able to move online?
  - xxpor 3y ago
    As perf evals become more thunderdome in this environment, this issue is going to get worse, not better.
  - pests 3y ago
    Tools are see up to log by default. Apps exist for the ephemeral conversation you desire. Like Snapchat. Where one of the features is conversations disappear. I don't think everything is so gloom and doom like you make it out to be.
  - 3y ago
bigstrat2003 3y ago
That is what unethical people do. Sensible people have a retention policy that balances storage cost with need to look at the archives, rather than "we have to make sure we don't get caught doing illegal shit".
- lazide 3y ago
  It’s often not that anyone is doing illegal shit or not, it’s that archives can be mined for out of context quotes that will ruin the company or people involved regardless. And large archives also dramatically increase costs of complying with civil discovery, which already can make the most ridiculous lawsuit costs millions just to ‘deal with’.
  - AceJohnny2 3y ago
    For example (1998) https://www.wired.com/1998/09/microsoft-subpoenas-bad-attitude/ https://www.wired.com/1998/09/microsoft-subpoenas-bad-attitu... (not linking to jwz's own recollection of the event, due to HN referral trap)
    - em-bee 3y ago
      (why not link? it's not like we don't know how to circumvent that) https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html about that list, i am sorry, but i don't feel that badmouthing anyone is healthy ever. doing that in a group is not catharsis but it is reinforcing bad attitudes, discontent or even hatred. that is not something i want in my company. if any of my employees set up such a list or forum, i would tell them to stop that immediately, under threat of being fired if they didn't comply. not because of the risks involved, but because i do not want anyone to think that doing that is ok. it isn't! Perhaps its best to just never say anything that you wouldn't want published.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Sure, but that doesn’t mean people don’t do it all the time.
deciduously 3y ago
It's right there in the name, Searchable Log of All Company Knowledge.
- kevindamm 3y ago
  now that's a good backronym
  - csallen 3y ago
    It was the original origin of the name Slack, actually
    - realfeel78 3y ago
      A backronym, surely.
      - csallen 3y ago
        Yeah most likely
- anticensor 3y ago
  Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge, actually.
- Ringz 3y ago
  Saved for the next junior pm, who tries to add Slack to the stack.
bsimpson 3y ago
The thing Google got chastised for is having a short retention policy.
ParetoOptimal 3y ago
> What sensible people do is have a retention policy of not keeping chats longer than, say seven days. Maybe that's good from a company perspective, but from an employee perspective not being able to search old conversations is abysmal.
- bitmasher9 3y ago
  Most tech companies shut down or slow down for 1-2weeks around Christmas. Imagine coming back to an empty Slack.
  - nickstinemates 3y ago
    Sounds amazing.
    - popcalc 3y ago
      I owe you a soda.
  - popcalc 3y ago
    Sounds wonderful :)
taeric 3y ago
Seven is almost certainly too short of a timeline for this? I'd expect the retention policy to be at least months, if not longer. Certainly for top level employees.
NotSammyHagar 3y ago
But that is exactly how corporations work. When I worked at Microsoft more than 10 years ago, they set everyone's exchange storage to a small amount and they auto-deleted old email, but the storage per person was too small, with lots of messages with embedded docs, etc. So every developer was wasting time deleting messages, trying to get under the storage limit so you could send and receive new email. And they were auto-deleting chats after a time. I was in some random group of people that were supposed to preserve material for a lawsuit, but they wouldn't give me more storage, I think what I did was store appropriate emails locally on my desk top. In later jobs we were using slack and they auto-deleted them after a week or two. We were allowed to create persistent slack channels that were private. This whole area is a waste of time, where the lawyers reduced the legal risk of the company from lawsuits, they transferred the cost to their dev teams wasting time managing this. At this company "our developers are our most important resource" but we weren't that important. I told my manager that all the devs were wasting time with this, probably a few hours a week figuring out if they should "preserve something" to remember decisions that were made. He agree it was a huge waste of time.
- foofie 3y ago
  > When I worked at Microsoft more than 10 years ago, they set everyone's exchange storage to a small amount and they auto-deleted old email, but the storage per person was too small, with lots of messages with embedded docs, etc. So every developer was wasting time deleting messages, trying to get under the storage limit so you could send and receive new email. I think Amazon also follows that practice. It assigns something like 2GB of email storage for everyone, and also has a policy in place to ask to increment storage by 250MB bumps. At each request, users are gently nudged to just delete emails.
llm_nerd 3y ago
This goes without saying, but those in the financial industry should be aware that there are stringent record keeping requirements that apply to things like text messaging, Slack, etc. Quite recently a set of firms were fined $1.1 billion for not retaining text messages, for instance.
mlhpdx 3y ago
It’s not after an investigation begins, it’s the moment that it’s likely or foreseeable that an legal action may come. Basically, if you think you might be in trouble and you delete stuff, you definitely are. Edit: illegal -> a legal

jgalt212 3y ago

> What sensible people do is have a retention policy of not keeping chats longer than, say seven days. or seven years if the SEC is watching over you.

gherkinnn 3y ago

Retaining messages for no longer than a week or two would act as a forcing function to keep project management and comms sane.

wharvle 3y ago
True in theory. In practice, I’ve never seen a “more-correct” system actually replace the value of long-lived chat channels and a culture of discussing things out in the open on those channels. Long-lived chats don’t replace documentation and project management, but I’ve yet to see those replace the value of long-lived chats. Now, it probably could be replaced by companies putting project management in a non-hellish tool that’s close to the code and has a pleasant chatting-about-issues experience and low structure so you don’t feel like you’re knocking over some PM’s sand castle if you mess with it (so NOT jira, asana, et c) but I’ve never experienced a company that does that. Communicating in the PM tools is always terrible.
ParetoOptimal 3y ago
Even though I commented up thread that not having logs for more than 7 days would be horrible for an employee, I don't necessarily disagree fully with this statement. It would ideally force employees to take notes and keep comms/project management sane, however I'm more likely to believe people would just get used to finding an easier workaround or guessing.

dylan604 3y ago

Wouldn't any chance to retention policies be a bit of a possible canary trap?

eschneider 3y ago
Not really an issue. When you're in a situation where you need to retain data for legal reasons, You TELL people that, so they don't inadvertently destroy the data. It's the opposite of a secret.
- mlhpdx 3y ago
  And, there is software for it that automates sending and getting confirmation the notification has been received and understood. One example: https://www.exterro.com/e-discovery-software/legal-hold https://www.exterro.com/e-discovery-software/legal-hold

lxgr 3y ago

It's still bizarre to me that this has become the industry standard in the US. Sure, it's all legal and perfectly reasonable at the micro level considering that every stored email increases the legal fees (due to making discovery more expensive during any hypothetical future lawsuit), but at a macro level, the outcome "companies legally delete all written communications as soon as feasible" seems baffling. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the financial industry, where regulators effectively require recording every single bit of business communication (by taking a very liberal interpretation of some quite old law, as far as I understand), written or spoken (unless it was in person, of course), and under threat of massive fines. It seems to me like there should be some pragmatic middle ground somewhere between these two extremes?

eschneider 3y ago
The "companies legally delete all written communications as soon as feasible" outcome isn't (mostly) because companies are trying to hide illegal shit. It's because when you get sued for whatever, and your email/chat/whatever get subpoenaed, there's going to be who-knows-how-much embarrassing personal gossip in there, too and that just makes folks look bad. The easiest way to avoid that (and other forms of embarrassment) is to just not keep that stuff around. If it's policy, it's legal. You can't go around and delete the stuff after the fact.
- mattmcknight 3y ago
  It's also just a massive time/money sink to have your own legal team review all of that stuff. You don't want to send anything to another party before you have reviewed it. In addition, there are often conflicting rules there, where there is private information of unrelated parties in the messages, so the review process just becomes unmanageable if it is an archive over a long period of time. Meanwhile, we now have people putting stuff into their own personal information management systems, training various models on the data, etc. When the company ceases to be a valuable library of the information necessary to do your job, people start specifically archiving things that might be useful at some point in the future, and the discovery process becomes unbounded.

paulddraper 3y ago

> I know what you're thinking, "Slack is our project archive." If that's actually true, .gov investigations are the LEAST of your problems. I'm thinking Slack is my conversation archive.

scruple 3y ago
We must not have the same employer. Our private message retention rate must be 30 days. It's fucking infuriating but I also believe it's directly correlated to TFA.
Karellen 3y ago
Why do you have a "conversation archive"? Wouldn't you consider it really fucking weird if every time you had an informal, in-person discussion with a friend, or maybe a partner, or even a co-worker, that they insisted on writing everything both of you said in a notebook to keep a permanent record of it, in case they wanted to call you out on something you kind of blurted out without too much thought ten years from now, or to be able to turn it over to the authorities if they ever (incorrectly?) thought you might be implicated in something dodgy? Or for it to be available for someone to steal and/or make copies of? They can never just have a chat with you? Shoot the shit and put the world to rights, without you keeping meticulous records of every goddamn word they said off the cuff? You don't think that, maybe, the more our real lives move online, the more that that kind of friendly, informal, ephemeral conversation ought to be able to move online?
- xxpor 3y ago
  As perf evals become more thunderdome in this environment, this issue is going to get worse, not better.
- pests 3y ago
  Tools are see up to log by default. Apps exist for the ephemeral conversation you desire. Like Snapchat. Where one of the features is conversations disappear. I don't think everything is so gloom and doom like you make it out to be.
- 3y ago

bigstrat2003 3y ago

That is what unethical people do. Sensible people have a retention policy that balances storage cost with need to look at the archives, rather than "we have to make sure we don't get caught doing illegal shit".

lazide 3y ago
It’s often not that anyone is doing illegal shit or not, it’s that archives can be mined for out of context quotes that will ruin the company or people involved regardless. And large archives also dramatically increase costs of complying with civil discovery, which already can make the most ridiculous lawsuit costs millions just to ‘deal with’.
- AceJohnny2 3y ago
  For example (1998) https://www.wired.com/1998/09/microsoft-subpoenas-bad-attitude/ https://www.wired.com/1998/09/microsoft-subpoenas-bad-attitu... (not linking to jwz's own recollection of the event, due to HN referral trap)
  - em-bee 3y ago
    (why not link? it's not like we don't know how to circumvent that) https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html about that list, i am sorry, but i don't feel that badmouthing anyone is healthy ever. doing that in a group is not catharsis but it is reinforcing bad attitudes, discontent or even hatred. that is not something i want in my company. if any of my employees set up such a list or forum, i would tell them to stop that immediately, under threat of being fired if they didn't comply. not because of the risks involved, but because i do not want anyone to think that doing that is ok. it isn't! Perhaps its best to just never say anything that you wouldn't want published.
    - lazide 3y ago
      Sure, but that doesn’t mean people don’t do it all the time.

deciduously 3y ago

It's right there in the name, Searchable Log of All Company Knowledge.

kevindamm 3y ago
now that's a good backronym
- csallen 3y ago
  It was the original origin of the name Slack, actually
  - realfeel78 3y ago
    A backronym, surely.
    - csallen 3y ago
      Yeah most likely
anticensor 3y ago
Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge, actually.
Ringz 3y ago
Saved for the next junior pm, who tries to add Slack to the stack.

bsimpson 3y ago

The thing Google got chastised for is having a short retention policy.

ParetoOptimal 3y ago

> What sensible people do is have a retention policy of not keeping chats longer than, say seven days. Maybe that's good from a company perspective, but from an employee perspective not being able to search old conversations is abysmal.

bitmasher9 3y ago
Most tech companies shut down or slow down for 1-2weeks around Christmas. Imagine coming back to an empty Slack.
- nickstinemates 3y ago
  Sounds amazing.
  - popcalc 3y ago
    I owe you a soda.
- popcalc 3y ago
  Sounds wonderful :)

taeric 3y ago

Seven is almost certainly too short of a timeline for this? I'd expect the retention policy to be at least months, if not longer. Certainly for top level employees.

NotSammyHagar 3y ago

But that is exactly how corporations work. When I worked at Microsoft more than 10 years ago, they set everyone's exchange storage to a small amount and they auto-deleted old email, but the storage per person was too small, with lots of messages with embedded docs, etc. So every developer was wasting time deleting messages, trying to get under the storage limit so you could send and receive new email. And they were auto-deleting chats after a time. I was in some random group of people that were supposed to preserve material for a lawsuit, but they wouldn't give me more storage, I think what I did was store appropriate emails locally on my desk top. In later jobs we were using slack and they auto-deleted them after a week or two. We were allowed to create persistent slack channels that were private. This whole area is a waste of time, where the lawyers reduced the legal risk of the company from lawsuits, they transferred the cost to their dev teams wasting time managing this. At this company "our developers are our most important resource" but we weren't that important. I told my manager that all the devs were wasting time with this, probably a few hours a week figuring out if they should "preserve something" to remember decisions that were made. He agree it was a huge waste of time.

foofie 3y ago
> When I worked at Microsoft more than 10 years ago, they set everyone's exchange storage to a small amount and they auto-deleted old email, but the storage per person was too small, with lots of messages with embedded docs, etc. So every developer was wasting time deleting messages, trying to get under the storage limit so you could send and receive new email. I think Amazon also follows that practice. It assigns something like 2GB of email storage for everyone, and also has a policy in place to ask to increment storage by 250MB bumps. At each request, users are gently nudged to just delete emails.

llm_nerd 3y ago

This goes without saying, but those in the financial industry should be aware that there are stringent record keeping requirements that apply to things like text messaging, Slack, etc. Quite recently a set of firms were fined $1.1 billion for not retaining text messages, for instance.

mlhpdx 3y ago

It’s not after an investigation begins, it’s the moment that it’s likely or foreseeable that an legal action may come. Basically, if you think you might be in trouble and you delete stuff, you definitely are. Edit: illegal -> a legal