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Submission + - Is It Time to Call BS on "The Retention Policy Ate My Communications" Excuse?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: The FTC is accusing Amazon execs, including founder Jeff Bezos, of using encrypted messaging apps that automatically delete messages to communicate, even after they were notified they were under investigation. The FTC is asking a judge to force Amazon to produce documents related to the company’s failure to preserve Signal messages, the company’s document preservation notices, and its instructions about using disappearing messaging applications. The FTC alleges Amazon execs did this while discussing "sensitive business matters, including antitrust" (instead of using email) to destroy potential evidence. Google also came under fire this week in its antitrust case over an issue about whether it intentionally deleted or failed to retain documents that might have been used as evidence in the trial. Google had a policy of having 'history off' on its chats by default, leaving it to employees [including CEO Sundar Pichai] to determine when to turn it on for relevant conversations (akin to some police bodycam policies). The Department of Justice (DOJ) called the alleged destruction of documents "unequivocal and honestly breathtaking," adding that "there’s no question" executives "intentionally had conversations with history off." "Google’s retention policy leaves a lot to be desired," said the judge, adding disapprovingly that it was “surprising to me that a company would leave it to their employees to decide when to preserve documents." And back in 2018, Facebook acknowledged that a secret Messenger retention policy feature was the cause of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's mysteriously disappearing messages.

Which begs the question — are Mission Impossible-like self-destructing email, messaging, and document policies beneficial to rank-and-file employees, or is this more about a play to "reduce your risk in the event of litigation [...] by permanently deleting old content that you're no longer required to keep," as Microsoft explains? Microsoft goes on to claim that destroying all of your employees' communications — like the University of Washington's just-implemented Microsoft Teams Chat Message 'Retention' Project that calls for destroying all of the university's messages after 30 days with 'no exceptions' (UW also suggests other FOIA-dodging 'best practices') — will also "help your organization to share knowledge effectively and be more agile by ensuring that your users work only with content that's current and relevant to them." However, former Microsoft Researcher Jonathan Grudin (coincidentally a UW affiliate professor) found plenty of pushback on the idea of improving-knowledge-by-deleting-communications when the company unsuccessfully tried to make Microsoft employees eat their own retention policy dogfood that the company was selling to other organizations. Grudin explained in a 2021 interview:

"Now I'll describe a couple unpublished projects. One was an email system. Someone said, 'We call it email retention but really it's email deletion.' We were told that starting the next April, all email a year old would be automatically deleted. IBM had such a system and some of our customers wanted it. I contacted friends at IBM who described it as a nightmare. [...] Why did we think it would be a good idea to use it internally at Microsoft? Some guessed storage costs, but those were dropping daily. Well, companies might have bodies that they'd like to remain buried, conversations that they would prefer not to surface. But you can't legally destroy inculpatory evidence, and an embarrassing remark that makes headlines generally has little weight in court where they look for patterns of behavior over time. The real reason turned out to be discovery costs. Microsoft and many companies are involved in far more legal proceedings than you read about. They have to pay attorneys to read all subpoenaed emails. It reportedly came to about $30 million a year. A team of about 10 people were managing the email deletion project. Some had given up other jobs to work on it, because they loved this idea. Most had information management backgrounds. They believed that only records with business value should be kept. Seeing big email folders 'makes my skin crawl,' one remarked. This view came from an era of paper documents and Rolodexes when filing and finding documents was manual. It was really difficult. It was expensive. Whereas for me and others, email is a Rolodex as well as a source of a lot of information whose future value we don't know."

"I learned that 1000 Microsoft employees were testing the software, a process referred here to as eating dogfood. I asked how it was going for these folks. An information manager beamed and said, 'It's working!' [...] I asked, 'What do the employees using it, think about it?' This surprised the team. It never occurred to them to ask. They were sure that the employees would see the value of email deletion for the company. They were really curious. They did realize that a survey and interview might uncover gripes, but they wanted to find out. [...] The interviews, which of course did find ingenious and time-consuming ways that people were dodging deletion. [...] So what did we find? Well, the cost to the company, in lost time and effort from email deletion, would easily exceed $30 million annually. [..] The deployment was canceled. [...] A partner in a San Francisco law firm heard about my findings and called up. He said that some companies would use email deletion software, whatever the cost. He explained, 'Phillip Morris is in the business of addicting people to something that will kill them. They'll pay what they need to as long as the business is profitable. Once it stops being profitable, they'll stop.'"

Comment Re:ISA (Score 1) 42

by SuiteSisterMary (#64424172) Attached to: Veteran PC Game 'Sopwith' Celebrates 40th Anniversary

Yeah, I never had a problem with IRQ/DMA fuckery having a pretty loaded up (for the time) machine; Awe32 with Waveblaster daughterboard, ATI Rage 64 card, etc etc.

The main challenges back then were dealing with your low memory; figuring out the exact right order to load mscdex, memory manager, mouse driver and every thing else to squeeze out every bit of conventional memory, and using loadhigh to squeeze what you could into UMA, because that 1 kb difference could mean Wing Commander 2 didn't play the speech packs.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 26

by Mal-2 (#64422554) Attached to: Steam Closes Early Access Playtime Loophole

Refunding is also for when what you bought is not what you thought it was. I bought Tabletop Simulator, only to find out it has NO ability to automate. It's solely for play with a live game master. Automating the DM component so I could paly alongside my players was the whole point, and it doesn't do that. So, refund. It's not a bad product, but it's also not useful for me.

Comment Re:Well, there's one logical consequence (Score 1) 149

by Mal-2 (#64418694) Attached to: China's Ageing Tech Workers Hit By 'Curse of 35'

Not always. As long as there are athletics, there will remain a need for coaches, scouts, and managers. A lot of retired professional athletes even planned for this when they were still in school and took leadership courses and sport psychology -- courses which will help them later whether they actually graduate their university or not. Others end up in broadcasting, or otherwise "go Hollywood" like Carl Weathers, Howie Long, Terry Crews, Bob Uecker, Alex Karras, Merlin Olsen, and even the recently departed OJ before he made himself unpopular. Some become politicians, but that's not that far removed from going Hollywood.

A lot of athletes also parlay their earnings into starting a business or buying into one that already exists, some (John Elway for example) with more success than others. There's not even a need to wait until retirement to enact this plan.

But yes, some do end up in normal day jobs when they retire. I worked an office job with a retired NHL player who, although he barely knew ANYTHING about the line of business we were in, was a very quick study. Within two years, he'd gone from "the new guy" to our best new business producer. It undoubtedly helped that he was a genuinely nice guy that wanted to do his new job well.

Comment Re:Well, there's one logical consequence (Score 1) 149

by Mal-2 (#64418616) Attached to: China's Ageing Tech Workers Hit By 'Curse of 35'

I know this doesn't help now, but a little back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that even if you start with a ratio of 80% one gender, it only takes a few generations to achieve a much healthier 60/40 split without particularly trying. Of course this supposes that there are no forces continuing to skew the demographics through deliberate choices, because those actions that made the imbalance can also preserve that imbalance. It's just that if people just give up and take their hands off the controls entirely, things will still sort themselves out in a time scale not too different from how long it took to get in the mess in the first place.

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