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
This is probably why my company sets 90 day retention on emails and chats
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.
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!
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
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.
First thing I do when I’m told to delete messages is SecureDrop them to the press
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.
I respectfully disagree. They were built for power and control from the start. Monestisation just paid for it and helped adoption.
I think you’ve got it backwards. Like the other person said, this shit was built to make money, the power and control came later. Said power and control also came partially from the money, since money is just power coupons, and they used that to buy up competitors and regulators alike to get to the state their in now.
Not everything is built with evil intentions. Quite frequently, evil corrupts otherwise benign institutions as they gain power to serve the ends of those already in power.
My dear child… They are already doing this. Us and Israeli spooks already infiltrated all mega corps. Mega corps know and collaborate.
All of them are balls deep helping waffen IDF do a genocide…
They help ice gestapo to target people within the US…
These examples are merely what has been publicly documented.
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.
Yes, it’s a lot worse. The particular difference is that one of these organizations has the power to disappear you without consequence.
Are you kidding?? They are way more accountable now to Wall Street and what’s left of US federal regulators and still-useful regulators like the EU. If nationalized they would answer to no one.
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
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
I’ve always wondered, is this illegal? Like obviously it is if they’ve already been subpoenaed or something.
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.
