Yes, there are laws about preserving evidence and records. However, these laws haven't been updated to reflect how office communication has changed over the years. No one would propose, circa 1950, that companies must record every conversation between two people in the office for regulatory compliance or lawsuit discovery, etc. purposes.
But effectively, that's what retention requirements for chat messages amount to.
What is the principled policy argument (ignoring practicality) for requiring retention of chat messages, but not requiring every employee to wear a body camera that permanently records every work-related interaction they have IRL?
> Yes, there are laws about preserving evidence and records. However, these laws haven’t been updated to reflect how office communication has changed over the years.
Yes, they have.
> No one would propose, circa 1950, that companies must record every conversation between two people in the office for regulatory compliance or lawsuit discovery, etc. purposes.
No one proposes the digital equivalent, only that once a record is created (which online chats inherently do in the course of executing them), the record be preserved. Which, in the 1950s, is exactly the rule that applied to anything that a record was created of.
> But effectively, that’s what retention requirements for chat messages amount to.
No, its not.
> What is the principled policy argument (ignoring practicality) for requiring retention of chat messages, but not requiring every employee to wear a body camera that permanently records every work-related interaction they have IRL?
The principled policy argument is that once records are created, deleting them when the conditions for a litigation hold exists is destruction of things known to be evidence in current or anticipated litigation, and that allowing parties to selectively destroy evidence with knowledge and reasonable anticipation of litigation unreasobably obstructs the discovery of truth the the legal process.
Chats are in no way special with regard to this argument.
Making everyone wear body cams: they weren't previously using body cams, you have to spend $ to buy them, the cams will capture me while using the washroom.
Stopping the deletion of chats: an IT person has to toggle a setting.
It feels pretty different to me! To roll with your 1950s analogy, it feels a lot more like the office secretaries being told that instead of shredding inter-office memos, they have to hold on to them.
I realize you said ignoring practicality...but that seems like a weird constraint to add. Bureaucracies run through paperwork, so capturing emails and DMs are often sufficient, while being much less invasive and cheaper.
> To roll with your 1950s analogy, it feels a lot more like the office secretaries being told that instead of shredding inter-office memos, they have to hold on to them.
There are still interoffice memos in a modern office - they're called emails. But in 1950, if you wanted to just ask a quick question of your colleague Joe, you'd walk over to his office and ask him verbally. Regulators understood that these sorts of interaction happen all the time, are a natural part of business, and didn't try to require that records of these be documented or retained.
Today, if you want to ask a quick question of your colleague Joe (who might be in a different state), you just send him a message on Slack. And the same regulations originally written for interoffice memos in the 1950s require that your Slack messages be retained. The same regulations now cover a much broader range of types of communication and business interactions than they were ever intended to.
Rather, the requirement is not equivalent to a requirement to wear a body camera, but instead to a requirement that if you wear and have actively recording a body camera, you can’t destroy the recording if it is relevant to a subject of reasonably anticipated, or actually in progress, litigation.
The point is that we use written communication a lot more in a modern (especially remote) office than we did in 1950, and for a much broader range of purposes and interactions than when the regulations requiring records retention were written.
Yes, there are laws about preserving evidence and records. However, these laws haven't been updated to reflect how office communication has changed over the years. No one would propose, circa 1950, that companies must record every conversation between two people in the office for regulatory compliance or lawsuit discovery, etc. purposes.
But effectively, that's what retention requirements for chat messages amount to.
What is the principled policy argument (ignoring practicality) for requiring retention of chat messages, but not requiring every employee to wear a body camera that permanently records every work-related interaction they have IRL?