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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

> It's not shady – just a way of limiting liability.

It's not euphemistic – just diplomatic phrasing.

I wouldn't go that far. If it's a legal practice, it's a legal practice. I can understand why a company would want to limit their liability over something that happened seven years in the past, even when they are confident that their procedures are both rigorous and in compliance with the law.

On the whole, I would say the problem isn't so much using language to whitewash the practice as the troublesome tendency to turn a blind eye until someone becomes persona non grata.

Just because something is legal doesn't make it right or good for society.

I don't think anyone is claiming that the destruction of evidence is right or good for society. On the other hand, do we really want to live in a world where everyone needs to be paperwork pack rats? One thing that I can assure you is requiring the retention of documents that provide evidence of a crime, while allowing for the destruction of everything else after seven years, wouldn't have the desired outcome. (Though it would be amusing to see which corporations have the largest indefinite data retention warehouses if it did work!)

I also think the right and good for society means addressing crimes in a timely manner, which likely means more auditing by independent bodies. Punishing someone for a crime that happened 7+ years ago may feel good, but it is meaningless for a couple of reasons. Should we be punishing people who have reformed? And for those who don't reform, should we be letting criminal behaviour occur across multiple decades?

Look, if you want better behavior lobby for longer retention, simple as that, laws will be passed if there is enough will behind. Or some centralized store, whatever. Eveeybody will align if things are clear and legally required by date xyz.

Dont blame any private company that its not overstepping its legal requirements and adding risks and costs to their business. Its like blaming a guy, any guy, heck all HN we dont pay more taxes than we have to pay, it goes to good things and is moral no?

We can do both, it's not hard to advocate for change while calling out bad actors as bad actors. Many companies openly degrade society while following the law. That still doesn't make it right. These are just excuses to allow authoritarians to degrade our lives and society unabated.

Do you honestly expect all businesses to keep all records forever? Do you understand the costs and labor required to do this? No one does this.

In an age of exabytes, -yes-

Lol ok champ.

You can be sarcastic but there is no reason you've said why emails and documents of a few megabytes can't be permanently saved by companies using Exabytes of data. Make your point

Understanding the intricacies of large enterprise data and all the forms it can take is an exercise left to the reader. It isn't simple and I'm not sure why anyone would think it is. There isn't just like, a single fileshare you have to monitor. There are many more numbers than just X amount of data.

In a world where I’ve had a dossier in some corporate database since Rapleaf in 2007, I’m completely unwilling to accept your opinion that basic document retention based on account id is more complicated than I’m assuming. edit: the only things that I can see motivating it's lack of existence is lack of law and the desire for greater profitability. nothing technical has prevented it

How many times has the company changed their archiving service? How many datacenters do they have? How many network shares? What about one drive? Local docs? Gsuite? Remote profile accounts on RDS servers? AS400 shares? What about CAD cloud docs? How many times has the email archiving service changed? Warm storage vs cold storage? How will that be managed? When does it go into read only state? How are you tracking document changes? What about SharePoint docs and lists? Do you need to save vm snapshots? And on and on.

Everything you listed, including the on and on, is immaterial to the point I'm making. You're just listing the costs of doing business. I'm not saying there are no challenges, especially given how history has unfolded. I'm saying that in a world where google has maintained a copy of my gmail account since 2004, its reasonable that we should have written into law "If you send an official communication to a customer you must maintain a record of that communication which can be obtained by request of the customer or customer's estate until the dissolution of the company (upon which the state government would take custody)", and if we had, along with all the downstream effects from implementing such a law, we would live in a better society. I'm not saying it wouldn't be expensive and potentially dangerous given how poor we are at data protection presently, but IMO it would be worth it compared to the shitshow we inhabit.

So a lawn maintenance company and Google should have the same data retention standards? It isn't free.

Who said anything like that? You seem to be jumping to conclusions rather than actually considering my point.

You're talking like doing anything at a company is impossible when the company is only that large because they employ people to do many things. Everything on your list is just a job for a few people with some executive decisions. Maybe even just a list to feed into an LLM

Some of those decisions should just be forced by law.

No, I'm saying a limit on data retention time is an obvious thing.

Apparently it's way too hard and complicated for a multi-billion dollar enterprise to retain documents but quite easy to tell clients how to evade taxes.

What a fucked up world.

They downvoted him because he spoke the truth

Destroying evidence of a crime is itself a crime.

Please, this is quite literally why the policies exist. If you want to change the world, you must first accept it for what it is

In most jurisdictions there are retention policies defined in law. Companies, like almost anyone else in the world, will do the bare minimum necessary to meet the legal requirements because it doesn’t make sense to do more. They only incur expenses while exposing themselves to all kinds of liability.

"Its just how we commit crimes quietly"

Organizations are not run by a single person. Imagine yourself as an investor into a large organization. Or you are invited to work as a CEO. You would definitely want to limit your own responsibility (in terms of financial losses or legal costs) when there are hundreds or thousands of people working together and anyone can make a mistake.

Of course you'd have compliance department to look over the processes to minimize the risk of mistakes and correct them ASAP (if you don't, you'd be liable for negligence and open yourself to a higher chance of failures). But since mistakes and miscommunication is inevitable anyway, you'd require hard limits in every obligation - in terms of time, money, scope etc.

Organizations that are not protecting themselves do not live long. And this principle has nothing to do with the nature of their activity.

Even in the year of 2026 not everyone is dumb enough to record themselves committing crimes and then brag about it online.

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