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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 bec

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.
- dmoy 3y ago
  Yup this one is it, right here. It's absolutely about discovery costs. Document review is typically like a quarter of all litigation cost, and that's assuming the problem of "get all the docs" is solved already.
- snapplebobapple 3y ago
  This is what got a company I worked at several years ago. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to have everything reviewed to be sent off to the government agency investigating us. We ended up settling for about a quarter of what it would have cost us to fight them in an actual court trial just because we were a large pile of money in before we even got near a trial and they abused their position and knowing our cash position to low ball us on settlement and force us into a settlement so they could save some face. The whole experience made it pretty obvious most of these agencies should be mostly gutted and rebuilt.
ghaff 3y ago
People write candid stuff on internal channels all the time that are not official company statements. And it's mostly not about illegal shit they did. It's things like $COMPANYA is eating our lunch because our sales processes are so screwed up. So when you file a lawsuit against $COMPANYA claiming that some questionable action caused you to lose business, their lawyers can cite the fact that you were already messed up for totally different reasons. [Corrected confused who is who :-)] (Very loose retelling of just a few of the sorts of things I saw when writing an expert witness report years ago.)
godelski 3y ago
It's also stochastically increases privacy and security. Restricts any adversary from obtaining your data outside of certain windows. Which can be important in dynamic environments where allies can become adversaries (be that prior employees, foreign governments, or whatever). This seems to have a huge advantage considering it means any adversary must make more noise and use longer term action to cause damage (i.e. hard to "smash and grab"). This is why when I saw the Signal Forum discussions on deleting chats that I was really surprised that that community was extremely against it (strongly in favor of immutable texts). All arguments against privacy were dismissed with claims that one can screenshot and arguments for immutable texts were bad analogies to mail and assertions about "my device, my data." The Signal Forums are a weird place and I think Signal's reliance on them contributes to their slow progress, adoption, and why they get weirdly sidetracked about things no one cares about.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  Software that can delete your copy of a text is fine. Software that can delete somebody else's copy of a text is not going to satisfy the somebody else, and is also not going to work because if they don't like it there are several other ways they can copy it, which in turn means you have no guarantees that they've deleted it and shouldn't expect any.
  - godelski 3y ago
    I appreciate the comment but I feel it fails to address mine. > is also not going to work because if they don't like it there are several other ways they can copy it >> All arguments against privacy were dismissed with claims that one can screenshot > you have no guarantees >> stochastically increases privacy and security I'm not sure why we have to frame privacy and security with strict guarantees. If we need strict guarantees then we should abandon all efforts because guarantees do not exist (my preemptive response to what you are thinking is "implementation.") Fundamentally it is always stochastic as statistics is a way to capture error and uncertainty. Everyone that advocates for deletion is well aware that one can screenshot, copy, or even write down information. It is a weird assumption to make, because it implies an exceptional level of stupidity to the person you respond to. Every 12 year old knows that you can screenshot Snapchats and they know it can be done without Snapchat warning the other person. So forgive me, because while I know you are acting in good intent (we've had enough conversations that I have that respect for you), I think I need to point out that it is easy to read such a response as indicating you did not bother to read my comment (so why comment?) or that you imply I am incredibly naive. I say this because this topic is often heated so stating this can help reduce the inference gap. I know you are not trying to do such a thing, but not all others will have that shared history to give benefit of the doubt. There's nuance necessary beyond the existence of copy methods. People with positions similar to mine understand that the act of copying requires time and energy. That someone needs to either preemptively implement a system of record keeping or that such an action is responsive. In the latter case, having the ability to delete acts as a windowing operation. You do not know your adversaries a priori nor do all adversaries begin as adversaries. So if you can delete the information before a log is created, you have succeeded. Yes, this is stochastic. But I'd rather have a 1% of protection than a 0%, because an immutable history just means the adversary has unlimited time to strike. Basically, you are doing your adversary's job for them. tldr: the game has a temporal component and it is not turn based. I will understand arguments about communication, of how some may assume stronger protection than received, but I'd also respond that this is a fairly universal claim and we do not apply it to many other domains as we still find utility. I'll also add that this stochastic protection is why companies will remotely wipe your devices if they are reported lost or stolen. You wipe for protection but operate under assumption that the data was copied. This is fairly standard practice.
lxgr 3y ago
> If it's policy, it's legal. I don't disagree that it's legal and mentioned that in my comment. What I'm claiming is that the way in which the legal system has evolved has incentivized problematic behaviors. > there's going to be who-knows-how-much embarrassing personal gossip in there, too and that just makes folks look bad That's what I was referring to by "making discovery more expensive during any hypothetical future lawsuit". Part of that cost is due to legal fees for discovery, but the other part is reputational harm: The problem here again isn't courts and parties to the lawsuit having access to that data, but rather that it's being explicitly published for the entire world to see and share. Personal gossip has absolutely no reason to be published as part of a lawsuit, in my view. If it's relevant to the case, make it available to its parties, read it out during the (usually public but non-broadcast) trial etc., but don't put it on an online case filing platform. Get rid of that, and the incentive to delete literally anything that's not legally required to be archived goes away too.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > Get rid of that, and the incentive to delete literally anything that's not legally required to be archived goes away too. Not exactly. One of the reasons companies do this is that random employees don't know how laws and courts work. They'll say things without knowing that the words they're using are a term of art with a different meaning in the law than it has the way they're using it, and then write something which would be damning if it was what they actually meant, but it wasn't what they actually meant. Or that sounds damning if taken out of context. Also, sometimes they really are breaking the law without knowing it and not having the evidence of that sitting around isn't really to the company's advantage either. The only real way to prevent companies from wanting to delete it would be to make it so it couldn't be used against them if they kept it.
  - lalaithion 3y ago
    > They'll say things without knowing that the words they're using are a term of art with a different meaning in the law than it has the way they're using And this is what we need to change. We need a presumption that when a non-lawyer says “we should form a cartel with our competitors” that they aren’t implying anything illegal, even though cartels are illegal.
watwut 3y ago
It is very mich be ause companies are trying to hide illegal shit. Cause, companies that font do not have "delete in 7 days" policies. And yes they do exist and have layers. It is not about gossip, it is very much about management knowing about illegal shit, wanting to keep it and wanting to hide it.
refurb 3y ago
Not only that, conversations can be misunderstood. People can have offline conversations, which then continue online, but missing all the context. People can use industry buzzwords to describe something in an inaccurate way. All of that is pure gold to an attorney looking to put a company in as bad a light as possible.

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.

dmoy 3y ago
Yup this one is it, right here. It's absolutely about discovery costs. Document review is typically like a quarter of all litigation cost, and that's assuming the problem of "get all the docs" is solved already.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
This is what got a company I worked at several years ago. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to have everything reviewed to be sent off to the government agency investigating us. We ended up settling for about a quarter of what it would have cost us to fight them in an actual court trial just because we were a large pile of money in before we even got near a trial and they abused their position and knowing our cash position to low ball us on settlement and force us into a settlement so they could save some face. The whole experience made it pretty obvious most of these agencies should be mostly gutted and rebuilt.

ghaff 3y ago

People write candid stuff on internal channels all the time that are not official company statements. And it's mostly not about illegal shit they did. It's things like $COMPANYA is eating our lunch because our sales processes are so screwed up. So when you file a lawsuit against $COMPANYA claiming that some questionable action caused you to lose business, their lawyers can cite the fact that you were already messed up for totally different reasons. [Corrected confused who is who :-)] (Very loose retelling of just a few of the sorts of things I saw when writing an expert witness report years ago.)

godelski 3y ago

It's also stochastically increases privacy and security. Restricts any adversary from obtaining your data outside of certain windows. Which can be important in dynamic environments where allies can become adversaries (be that prior employees, foreign governments, or whatever). This seems to have a huge advantage considering it means any adversary must make more noise and use longer term action to cause damage (i.e. hard to "smash and grab"). This is why when I saw the Signal Forum discussions on deleting chats that I was really surprised that that community was extremely against it (strongly in favor of immutable texts). All arguments against privacy were dismissed with claims that one can screenshot and arguments for immutable texts were bad analogies to mail and assertions about "my device, my data." The Signal Forums are a weird place and I think Signal's reliance on them contributes to their slow progress, adoption, and why they get weirdly sidetracked about things no one cares about.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
Software that can delete your copy of a text is fine. Software that can delete somebody else's copy of a text is not going to satisfy the somebody else, and is also not going to work because if they don't like it there are several other ways they can copy it, which in turn means you have no guarantees that they've deleted it and shouldn't expect any.
- godelski 3y ago
  I appreciate the comment but I feel it fails to address mine. > is also not going to work because if they don't like it there are several other ways they can copy it >> All arguments against privacy were dismissed with claims that one can screenshot > you have no guarantees >> stochastically increases privacy and security I'm not sure why we have to frame privacy and security with strict guarantees. If we need strict guarantees then we should abandon all efforts because guarantees do not exist (my preemptive response to what you are thinking is "implementation.") Fundamentally it is always stochastic as statistics is a way to capture error and uncertainty. Everyone that advocates for deletion is well aware that one can screenshot, copy, or even write down information. It is a weird assumption to make, because it implies an exceptional level of stupidity to the person you respond to. Every 12 year old knows that you can screenshot Snapchats and they know it can be done without Snapchat warning the other person. So forgive me, because while I know you are acting in good intent (we've had enough conversations that I have that respect for you), I think I need to point out that it is easy to read such a response as indicating you did not bother to read my comment (so why comment?) or that you imply I am incredibly naive. I say this because this topic is often heated so stating this can help reduce the inference gap. I know you are not trying to do such a thing, but not all others will have that shared history to give benefit of the doubt. There's nuance necessary beyond the existence of copy methods. People with positions similar to mine understand that the act of copying requires time and energy. That someone needs to either preemptively implement a system of record keeping or that such an action is responsive. In the latter case, having the ability to delete acts as a windowing operation. You do not know your adversaries a priori nor do all adversaries begin as adversaries. So if you can delete the information before a log is created, you have succeeded. Yes, this is stochastic. But I'd rather have a 1% of protection than a 0%, because an immutable history just means the adversary has unlimited time to strike. Basically, you are doing your adversary's job for them. tldr: the game has a temporal component and it is not turn based. I will understand arguments about communication, of how some may assume stronger protection than received, but I'd also respond that this is a fairly universal claim and we do not apply it to many other domains as we still find utility. I'll also add that this stochastic protection is why companies will remotely wipe your devices if they are reported lost or stolen. You wipe for protection but operate under assumption that the data was copied. This is fairly standard practice.

lxgr 3y ago

> If it's policy, it's legal. I don't disagree that it's legal and mentioned that in my comment. What I'm claiming is that the way in which the legal system has evolved has incentivized problematic behaviors. > there's going to be who-knows-how-much embarrassing personal gossip in there, too and that just makes folks look bad That's what I was referring to by "making discovery more expensive during any hypothetical future lawsuit". Part of that cost is due to legal fees for discovery, but the other part is reputational harm: The problem here again isn't courts and parties to the lawsuit having access to that data, but rather that it's being explicitly published for the entire world to see and share. Personal gossip has absolutely no reason to be published as part of a lawsuit, in my view. If it's relevant to the case, make it available to its parties, read it out during the (usually public but non-broadcast) trial etc., but don't put it on an online case filing platform. Get rid of that, and the incentive to delete literally anything that's not legally required to be archived goes away too.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> Get rid of that, and the incentive to delete literally anything that's not legally required to be archived goes away too. Not exactly. One of the reasons companies do this is that random employees don't know how laws and courts work. They'll say things without knowing that the words they're using are a term of art with a different meaning in the law than it has the way they're using it, and then write something which would be damning if it was what they actually meant, but it wasn't what they actually meant. Or that sounds damning if taken out of context. Also, sometimes they really are breaking the law without knowing it and not having the evidence of that sitting around isn't really to the company's advantage either. The only real way to prevent companies from wanting to delete it would be to make it so it couldn't be used against them if they kept it.
- lalaithion 3y ago
  > They'll say things without knowing that the words they're using are a term of art with a different meaning in the law than it has the way they're using And this is what we need to change. We need a presumption that when a non-lawyer says “we should form a cartel with our competitors” that they aren’t implying anything illegal, even though cartels are illegal.

watwut 3y ago

It is very mich be ause companies are trying to hide illegal shit. Cause, companies that font do not have "delete in 7 days" policies. And yes they do exist and have layers. It is not about gossip, it is very much about management knowing about illegal shit, wanting to keep it and wanting to hide it.

refurb 3y ago

Not only that, conversations can be misunderstood. People can have offline conversations, which then continue online, but missing all the context. People can use industry buzzwords to describe something in an inaccurate way. All of that is pure gold to an attorney looking to put a company in as bad a light as possible.