Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> He’s not being accused of deleting them. He is being accused of not creating the chat records in the first place.

Online chats exist as digital data ab initio, the issue is not creation (which had to happen for there to be a chat) but retention. The fact that the UI of a system may present things suggesting that “creating” a record is a separate act does not make it so.

View on HN

It's perfectly possible to build a chat system that never creates any logs or recordings. Their chat system doesn't make recordings and then immediately delete them if you're chatting "off the record".

Now, plaintiffs lawyers will presumably try an argument like yours but if they succeed it's not obvious why it wouldn't immediately require all meetings of all employees to be videoed and recorded in perpetuity (as a company like Google always has hundreds of in flight lawsuits), nor is it obvious why that wouldn't extend to meetings where all the participants are in the same room and thus don't need a video call at all - perpetual 24/7 surveillance.

The law isn't consistent with how it treats communication, so it's sort of obvious why a change to how one sort of communication is treated wouldn't necessarily impact a different sort of communication.

Is it put into RAM? That really is the creation of a record.

Not if it wasn't moved to somewhere more permanent. Otherwise speaking is also creating a record since you could have saved those air wave readings.

You’re quibbling over the use of “creation” while ignoring the fact that “CEO deletes chats” is a very misleading headline.

The document says he set his own relevant chats to delete after 24 hours. I think we are quibbling over what "delete" means. When he set them to auto delete after 24 hours he was essentially deleting them. It's like saying I've never deleted anything- I move files to my recycle bin and then my computer does what it does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com