> Google seems to be arguing that chats are different than other documents (informal and ephemeral, I guess?) and default auto-delete is reasonable for them.
My company has a default auto-delete for our email Inbox. Yet, we have all been trained to retain the emails (by moving them to a folder) if notified of a relevant legal event. I don't know if in practice I have to manually save them or whether IT will just disable autodelete on my account. In any case, the message is clear: Autodelete is not permissible under such circumstances.
In my org at Google, if you were under a legal hold, you were told to turn off retention for all conversations.
It was framed as "saving work for people who have to review conversations" (lol)
My org wasn't well-managed, lot of nepotism, promoting people who couldn't organize to save their life, but were good company men, too good. They saw having to have history off as a status badge because they saw higher ups did.
They even would independently escalate it from there. Towards the end of my tenure, a couple of them acted like it was obvious and mandatory not to name people in meeting notes. Such a strange place.
0 point in sharing, unfortunately. I don't think they weren't hiding anything important, certainly not for Search, and it'd play into their conception of the situation to name or do anything other than get far away, as soon as possible.
The bitter lesson from 7 years there was people are tribal and protect their own, everywhere. People regressed the higher up they got and longer they were there.
It was the tip of the iceberg in terms of conduct you think managers would care about. I dealt with what happened by smiling and nodding, not taking the dare to tell HR, telling a non-direct manager exactly once, and leaving.
At the end of the day, it's just a good ol' boys club with everyone trying to just get through one more day. Questioning is complaining is lack of cooperation is not a team player.
My company has a default auto-delete for our email Inbox. Yet, we have all been trained to retain the emails (by moving them to a folder) if notified of a relevant legal event. I don't know if in practice I have to manually save them or whether IT will just disable autodelete on my account. In any case, the message is clear: Autodelete is not permissible under such circumstances.
Sorry Google. Nice try.