This is probably why my company sets 90 day retention on emails and chats
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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I read the article, and it's way less bad than the title made it sound. They just set company chats to disappear after some number of days and told employees to not "comment before you have all the facts." This has been the policy of every company I've worked at, including university IT and Amazon.
The title made it sound like they were deleting specifically chats related to open court cases, which is like level 10 ultra-illegal.
I read the article
From the shitshow that's the comments, you're the only one
And again, that should result in jail time for all of those executives and all employees that actually destroyed messages
JAIL THEM, JAIL THEM NOW, JAIL THEM LONG
This sort of shit behavior will never end and only get worse until we, instead of hand slapping, start jailing these fuckers.
Jail a bunch of CEO's for breaking the law and watch how fast they start behaving.
Is it illegal for them to delete messages? I had always been under the impression that FOIA only covered government.
If it's about internal messages about illegal activities, yes. In a court case, during discovery, internal messages may be requested.
The idea for this asshat is that if those particular messages are missing, then that evidence is gone, making it tampering with evidence.
Normally that would result in a victory for them but if it comes out that they deleted relevant messages, like right now, then normally that would be very bad. If it were me, I would probably go to jail over that.
However, this is the US and it's about some rich asshole, so probably nothing will happen
Either of us deliberately destroy data: locked up.
Company exec does the same: slap on the butt and a $2 fine.
We should all be on the same playing field!
Thats uh... thats a gigantic crime rofl, fucking wow.
Not quite sure exactly what that slots into, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, not complying with the discovery process... but uh yeah wow dang, that's the kinda thing that can actually lead to charges against the actual people that do this, if not at least the people that order other to.
Great job, morons!
... fucking megacorp version of 'the discord channel got leaked, nuke everything!', especially if these directives were newly enacted after any of the anti trust suits began.
Musk is still free and has been openly doing this with self driving junk for years. This is the USA where we haven't had reasonable laws passed since the 1970s.
Nah, nothing will happen. At worst they get slapped on the hands with a few million dollars, and no one will care.
Jail these fuckers, jail them for long times, jail them now
Not quite sure exactly what that slots into, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, not complying with the discovery process.
Pretty sure that's a hat trick
Nationalize google and incarcerate their board.
Eh, you sure we want to give control of that shit to Trump and his people?
I'm not sure whether it could be worse.
It would be worse. They would use that access to target people.
Do you think anything is stopping them now? Why do you think these systems were built?
I mean they were built to make money, the fact that you can send them a national security letter is just a happy accident that keeps the NSA from having to run more datacenters.
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Profits. Dead people don't pay.
Dead people also have no claim on the present or future. You can own more, even when the pie is shrinking if you negate others claims.
they already are.
its been a while since snowden leaked that to us.
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Yes, it's a lot worse. The particular difference is that one of these organizations has the power to disappear you without consequence.
I know people like to hate on google, but google is actually like 3 companies in a trench coat.
They do highly valuable open source / open ecosystem work (I will say the chance of you indirectly using a google tool without knowing is over 90% now) and if the American government, a capitalist fascist government no less, gets their hands on it, we're fucked
Not all of google is adsense or YouTube.
I hope there’s no Google in my life.
they already have these companies wiretapped since the early 2000s
I read this as "incinerate". A principled, pragmatic opposition to the death penalty in any case I can think of is the only reason I would disapprove.
These types of requests always backfire. We got a similar request when I worked for a very large corporation and the very first thing I did was create a backup of our Lotus Notes and take it home. Just in case.
And someone spoke up, right?
...
Right...?
Actually, yes. It led to a huge lawsuit and changes in legislation regarding 401k contributions.
Justice boner, my favorite
Just use Signal. You may be in Pete Hegseth’s next message.
He still hasn't added me to any chats. What should I do?
Have you tried being rich and incompetent?
Did you say in your profile you’re a reporter? Ahha
This is why companies have data retention settings to automatically delete old emails and slack/teams/etc. and special processes a classifications to store those communications that relate to contracts and such.
First thing I do when I'm told to delete messages is SecureDrop them to the press
I've always wondered, is this illegal? Like obviously it is if they've already been subpoenaed or something.
Nah it's illegal to deliberately destroy data to impede investigations. You don't need to have an open investigation for that to be the case.
It remains legal to get rid of old files to free up space or if you genuinely believe they aren't necessary, though, so you need to prove intent.
If there's a subpeona or something, their destruction is itself a crime, but under this law, its the intent to defraud the courts that's illegal, and that intent is always illegal.
The law exists specifically for this situation. Purging important business documents preemptively is clearly not OK.
Citation: https://legalclarity.org/18-u-s-c-1519-destruction-alteration-or-falsification-of-records/
Just to add, if it's found that evidence was destroyed, beyond potential seperate charges for the destruction itself, a judge would also typically give an averse inference instruction to the jury. That means the jury should assume that the destroyed evidence would have been damning to whomever destroyed it.
What that tells me is, assuming google acted rationally in the destruction, either they think they have a reasonable chance that they can beat the evidence destruction charges, or that the evidence is so damning that the reality of the situation is considerably worse than whatever adverse inferences might be drawn.
(I am not a lawyer, so please take my interpretation with a large grain of salt.)
No that seems likely.
Evidence that would damn them here being in a court record makes it admissible elsewhere for a crime that isn't even prosecuted yet.
They're cutting off their foot to save their leg, here, since this isn't particularly secretive, seeing how we know about it.
Do you happen to know when the last time was that a rich company was prosecuted for this?
It seems a lot like the perjury laws: there to scare poor people into telling the truth because of almost non-existant prosecution of it.
And if it is a fine and not jail time (white collar crimes are almost never jail time) the fine would have to be much larger than the penalties they would not have to pay because of the crime, otherwise it is simply a net win for the company
Companies don't get jail time.
Sure, technically an individual could, but generally the actual destruction is an employee doing what they're told to do. They're somewhat complicit but the real problem is the c-suite people.
I unfortunately don't know when this last happened or any specific details on what the penalty would be, but I feel fairly confident that this law falls under the "cost of doing business" part of illegal corporate activity. I wish it didn't.
It's white collar crime. They'll pay a fine which will mean nothing to them, and nobody will go to jail. That's how it works.
It's illegal if antitrust action is anticipated, according to the article. That said, I know that most places I've worked have had a document retention policy that called for automatic deletion of most documents after some time period, like a year.
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they weren't feeling lucky?
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