> If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded.

> There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication.

Wow. This is the opposite of how I feel. Mega-corporations should have their communications logged at a much higher level than a normal business. The things that have come out in court show how they manipulated their customers (advertisers). Regardless of how you feel about advertising a portion of those companies are small mom and pop shops trying to get by. If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.

It ends up as evidence when routine business operations are breaking the law. Everywhere I’ve worked hasn’t had an issue with this stuff being tracked and several places actively preferred when stuff was recorded. Most companies don’t have an issue with clear communication because they’re not worried about what’s being said will end up part of a criminal investigation.

So this is something that’s almost exclusively going to harm criminal organizations by making them less efficient.

That sounds like a win win.

"Google produced 13 times as many emails as the average company per employee did before it was a decade old, Kent Walker, Google's top lawyer, testified in the Epic trial. Google felt overwhelmed, he said, and it was clear to the company that things would only become worse if changes weren't made."

According to Google's own testimony this is a Google problem not a problem shared by the other average companies that produce 13 times less email per employee than Google.^1

A reasonable person might suggest that the company's employees try to produce less email (and instant messages) like other companies.

Instead, a crook might agree that the company destroy email (and instant messages), potential evidence, immediately after being created.

But Google does not do that by default for the public with Gmail and its instant message services. Maybe because the average user is not a crook.

1. Google probably has far more than 13 times the amount of storage capacity than the average company.

Destroying potential evidence at a company is what it is. It is not like there are multiple ways to interpret it. Google did it even after they knew they were being inestigated.

> If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded.

Most orgs I've been at with this concern either on a large or silo'd level, will either change policies to fit, whether that be retention times for chat messages or guidelines to not record certain types of meetings/etc.

> There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication. Defining that, while allowing the collection of evidence of criminal activity, won't be easy, but the current state of affairs is unworkable.

Mixed bag. Not every org will be OK with someone bringing up various regulations known in a recorded meeting, or even saying the potential number of impacted risk cases on a call raised with an issue in production. OTOH I've been at shops where I asked about the legality of something and it was thanked for being on the record (Thankfully that org was super-compliant and it was never about production, only design.)

Many of the senior mandatory corporate trainings I've been to, often led by lawyers, basically state that "e-mail is evidence-mail" and to watch what you send.

This comment would make sense if all companies communicated like Google does, but they don’t. Most companies have remarkably open internal conversations.

As cheap as storage is, we're going to end up in a situation where every business with >100 employees is expected to have cameras and microphones recording and transcribing every conversation just in case people might be communicating outside email and chat.

> There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication

Funny really that it was Eric Schmidt who said on the topic of privacy: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

"... except if you're a corporate employee in a routine business conversation" – added Schmidt after some additional consideration.

Is something like Signal disappearing messages illegal?

I remember when Mark Cuban tried to make his CyberDust app.

having worked at a tech company subject to a “legal hold” just in case the government wanted to sue us in the future, i agree that it’s absolutely asinine. have to save every device, every file, every email, every chat, every document, forever, indefinitely? what does it even mean to “preserve a document”? can it be edited?

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