You are answering your own question yourself. Read carefully and notice how you use the world record in your post.
> Let's assume technology-wise, there are indeed no records kept, everything is ephemeral. Should the court order then apply to those chats?
No, there is no record to be kept.
> Now assume that the programmer of the app made an error, and accidentally records are kept for 24 hours. Should the court order now apply to those records?
Yes, the court order applies indiscriminately to all records no matter why or how they were made.
> Now assume that the programmer of the app made an error, and accidentally DATA is kept for 24 hours. As part of the error, the DATA is also automatically deleted after 24 hours.
I don't know it's a record, it's just a word I used. Now I use a different word, which is more appropriate in the context of a HN reader trying to misunderstand what I am saying. Because the question is exactly: Does this data constitute a record, or not? Just saying it does is not an answer.
It does constitute a record. You yourself spontaneously used the word record to talk about it. No one is trying to misunderstand what you are saying.
You want there to be some kind of big tricky debate to be had about what kind of data is or isn’t a record. There is none. People know what a record is and when they encounter one. If you are storing something for a time, you have a record of it. It really is that simple.
It's not that simple at all, especially in combination with automation and computing. What you are saying is that it is not possible to have an off-the-record chat app, because the data of the app will ALWAYS be stored somehow, even if it is just in RAM. Would you agree that this is what you are saying?
Maybe the world is just more complicated than you'd like to admit.
> What you are saying is that it is not possible to have an off-the-record chat app
No, it’s not at all what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is that if you are keeping records of what’s said for a time like most chat apps do then these records are indeed records and no amount of hypothetical distorting regarding RAM or amount of time or what not will change the fact that they are records and you will have to keep them if the court tell you to do so.
If you were using a P2P messaging app where no storage was done at all at any point then you would have no record. It’s not that complicated honestly. Just don’t keep records if you don’t want there to be records.
First of all, I think Google deliberately played games and they should get smacked hard for this.
But ... its not that simple any more.
A lot of the time, apps will be hibernated/suspended to disk, and then restored from disk. So talking about ram and storage in context of devices its kind of hard. Even some browsers now "suspend" your tabs to ssd, and then resume when you click back to them. So it's kind of hard to say if something was never on the disk or not.
I guess you could go with intent, that either app intentionally stored something or not, but then again you also design apps with suspend in mind so not sure how this one would play out.
> Let's assume technology-wise, there are indeed no records kept, everything is ephemeral. Should the court order then apply to those chats?
No, there is no record to be kept.
> Now assume that the programmer of the app made an error, and accidentally records are kept for 24 hours. Should the court order now apply to those records?
Yes, the court order applies indiscriminately to all records no matter why or how they were made.