Were these actual concerns that were raised by the actual legal council of the company, or were they issues invented by engineers who are not lawyers but suffer from engineers disease and think that knowing to code means they are experts in everything else? 'Cause I know plenty of those!

I've worked in plenty of companies with engineers who think they are legal, privacy and security experts. If we made business decisions based on these folks, we'd never do anything. Hell, every damn text change we makes invokes a few who worry about the legal ramifications ("should we file a JIRA ticket with legal?").

Sadly without somebody stepping in, people actually listen to them instead of the actual experts employed by the company... thus you wind up wasting tons of engineering bandwidth building a feature / platform / product that has no business existing all (or worse, not building some feature / platform / product) because nobody bothered to check with the legal / privacy / security team that some concern by a engineer was actually a genuine concern.

And even then, in any good organization legal / privacy / security teams exist only to point out all the risks in any business decision... sometimes it is worth the risk despite what legal / privacy / security say. What appetite the company has for the risk depends on a lot of things that are well outside of legal/privacy/security.

> Were these actual concerns that were raised by the actual legal council of the company, or were they issues invented by engineers who are not lawyers but suffer from engineers disease and think that knowing to code means they are experts in everything else? 'Cause I know plenty of those!

the general counsel and thus the entire legal org required for any company approved comms system a way to automatically by default destroy chat logs after 7 days (and to turn that off for folks who were on legal holds). slack in 2016 did not have that capability.

The fact that that number was "7 days" tells you everything you need to know about Uber's internal culture.

Not sure why the parent is down voted. I have worked in financial services and had the same experience. IT typically held a view on the interpretation of rules and regulations that was far more literal and restrictive than the actual compliance officers.

it was the privacy/legal/security types driving this strategic decision, I can't really talk about it in more depth. A lot has changed since the decision was made, and if I personally was to reassess the situation now I believe I would go with a 3rd party SAAS solution, but back then building a chat app was on balance the correct decision to make.

> it was the privacy/legal/security types driving this strategic decision

Booo on legal.... like I said earlier, it's easy to armchair quarterback. Sometimes I wonder how the fuck humanity even manages to make progress with so much waste and boneheaded decision making.