Not sure if it matters, but all chats at Google default to history off (deleted after 24hrs). Turning on history only keeps messages for 30days and you have to do this for every single group chat, private chat, etc. There is no archive or long held messages like Slack.
Yes, these settings were chosen specifically to destroy evidence, and the courts are increasingly unhappy with that. All conversations involving people on legal holds (such as the CEO!) should be retained indefinitely.
In-person and video/audio/phone conversations do not have the same requirements. What makes text chat that is meant to be ephemeral to be different than an in person chat?
I'm kinda sympathetic to Google in this case because the law makes it basically impossible to communicate with writing in a way that doesn't leave a paper trail. Messages being at minimum temporarily stored so you can read them is inherent to the medium.
It does seem reasonable that there should be some way, (outlined by the courts) to ephemerally text that gives it the same protections as an unrecorded phone call. Because in a world where it's not the 60s and business is done over text instead of phones we lost a lot of privacy with no change in the law itself.
It's the reverse. Phone calls and in person are loopholes that the government doesn't have a way to force recording of.
Fundamentally, the law is paradoxical. Freedom is in tension with law enforcement.
> What’s amazing to me is that they didn’t just use a phone call or video chat.
I don't know anything about these specific conversations, but one obvious difference between phone/video and chat is that the former has to synchronous whereas the latter can be async.
Async can be more practical people who are very busy, are travelling, are located in different timezones etc.
> What makes text chat that is meant to be ephemeral to be different than an in person chat?
It's not inherently ephemeral though. You can add deletion rules on top of that to try to pretend that it is, but the courts see right through that.
I'm struggling to think of any text-based communications that are inherently ephemeral. Generally anything committed to text is long lasting, and has always been (way pre-computer era).
That's a rather biased way of phrasing it. Did humans evolve mouths and ears specifically to destroy evidence? Those settings were chosen because the platform was designed to emulate hallway chats, and the "records" are an implementation detail.
If this goes through, all that will happen is that Google will re-engineer the backend to evade whatever standard set by the ruling. Who wins from this outcome? Perhaps the engineers getting paid and promoted to work on said project. Certainly not the courts or the "people".
