<story><title>FTC says Amazon executives destroyed potential evidence using apps like Signal</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/26/24141801/ftc-amazon-antitrust-signal-ephemeral-messaging-evidence</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never been a big fan of mandatory message retention.  To me, it just seems like punishment for the literate.  You don&amp;#x27;t make people under litigation holds carry around a voice recorder all day, so you&amp;#x27;re giving people an out; if they are a more talkative person than a writing person.  Since writing is harder than talking, this has always felt awfully unfair.&lt;p&gt;As for the lack of messages in this case, they always say the coverup is worse than the crime, but if you don&amp;#x27;t know what the crime is, how can you be so sure?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cjpearson</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s a different agency, but Matt Levine has written a fair amount on the SEC making a killing by fining banks when their employees use SMS or WhatsApp. It&amp;#x27;s a similar story where conversations that might have been held at the water cooler, lunch, after-work beers or the golf course are now often done through text which according to SEC means different regulation applies.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; From the perspective of the banks, I have argued, this is a novel expansion of the SEC’s authority. When the SEC created its rules on recordkeeping, it required banks to retain copies of their “inter-office memoranda,” but it was 1948 and those memoranda were produced with carbon paper; they were formal business records memorializing serious policies. In the 2020s, WhatsApp chats are, in large part, substitutes not for formal memoranda but for talking to someone in person. When I was a banker, I have written, “There were some mornings when I sent more than 100 inter-office memoranda, though like 20 of them would be ‘lol’ or ‘fml.’” In 1948, the SEC would not have dreamed of demanding a searchable archive of all of the informal chats held at a brokerage: That was not technologically feasible, and also did not seem to be the point of its rules. In 2022, it was feasible, and the SEC did demand it, and when the brokers were missing some chats they paid a billion dollars in fines.</text></comment>
<story><title>FTC says Amazon executives destroyed potential evidence using apps like Signal</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/26/24141801/ftc-amazon-antitrust-signal-ephemeral-messaging-evidence</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrockway</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never been a big fan of mandatory message retention.  To me, it just seems like punishment for the literate.  You don&amp;#x27;t make people under litigation holds carry around a voice recorder all day, so you&amp;#x27;re giving people an out; if they are a more talkative person than a writing person.  Since writing is harder than talking, this has always felt awfully unfair.&lt;p&gt;As for the lack of messages in this case, they always say the coverup is worse than the crime, but if you don&amp;#x27;t know what the crime is, how can you be so sure?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akira2501</author><text>&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;ve never been a big fan of mandatory message retention&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s the price of being publicly traded,  which is born out of our lessons learned from the Enron scandal,  and gave us incredibly simple SOX regulations,  and decades of strange antipathy towards them.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; it just seems like punishment for the literate.&lt;p&gt;Are you suggesting that companies are eschewing written communication for verbal communication as a means of bypassing this legislation?  And that it&amp;#x27;s unfair you have no similar bypass?  That&amp;#x27;s a pretty morally relative take.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; but if you don&amp;#x27;t know what the crime is, how can you be so sure?&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ve precisely described _why_ the coverup is seen as worse than the crime.</text></comment>