Companies will generally stop keeping records if this is the case.

Doubt it. Companies already have a "don't put your shady shit in writing" training and yet we see e-mails, often from high-ranking executives who really should know better, that are talking openly about the stuff that you'd expect companies to not keep records about.

It's also hard to work (collaborate) without keeping records, especially in a big international company.

But it will happen, just like people in government who hide what they do. FBI agents use personal cell phones to communicate. A Secretary of State used a personal email server for communications. The Freedom of Information Act has accelerated these not stopped them.

This stuff has a back and forth to it, but I really doubt people are documenting less stuff today than they did in say the 1920’s. Workers have less to high over these decisions than the people making them so there is often low level smoking guns.

And sure, several Secretaries of State used private e-mail severs, but there was also significant backlash over the practice. Again I doubt things are less documented today than before computers became the norm.

These policies usually get put in place once the company gets burned in court.

Just do like a parking garage — if you’ve lost your ticket, fine for the worst case.

I once used a car park to store my car for several days, without taking it out, and it was cheaper to lose my ticket and pay the fine vs paying the full amount. Because the fine was the 24hr price, vs the actual duration of 5-6 days.

Was this before "automated" car parks or they don't have that where you live? Where I live, all car parks automatically registers every single car that enters, and if I lose my ticket, I get a "fine" (extra cost) + the duration I was parked, as they'll just lookup when I arrived via the license plate.

Why do they even have tickets if they can look up when you entered?

If you have the ticket you can "self-checkout" by going to the machine to pay, not involving others. If you don't, you need to speak with the person who "manages" the parking lot, the person who sits in the little booth.

Some cars also have (something like) a bank/credit card attached to their front windows near the top, those people can just drive out and the payment is automatic right before the barrier that blocks the exit.

It's an easier UI. I visited a car park recently that had switched to ticketless operation, and now in order to pay, you have to enter your car license number using the on-screen keyboard. It's not exactly hard, but it's an order of magnitude harder than 'insert ticket, insert payment card'.

so they can charge you a fee for lost tickets :)

Most of them let you prepay before you leave to keep the flow of traffic moving, but I figure you could look up the fee by tag too since they already record it. lol.

This was in London last year. I've used a mixture but more often than not they are just dumb issue the ticket at a barrier and let you in type car parks. Need the same ticket to raise the barrier on the way out, after paying.

Not set up with automatic license plate reading cameras (ANPR or whatever the UK calls it).

Then fine them. Imagine if financial companies (like banks) could just conveniently not chose to store records.

Records of what?

It's not like there's a Dark Pattern Brainstorming meeting every Tuesday at 2pm. Big companies being evil is an emergent phenomenon. Nobody needs to be told explicitly that the offboarding flow should be as irritating as possible; all it takes is ICs understanding the business and realizing that they will be rewarded for positively impacting the bottom line and making their boss look good.

> Records of what?

What parent in this very thread said...

> There needs to be a Freedom of Information Act which applies to large companies, requiring them to record all the decisions they make, the goals they set, and the metrics they use to achieve them.

It needs to be even more standardized. So far in fact, that it could be part of a API, that could be handled by software, so that a robot could cancel the contract for the user. User should be able to create and cancel contracts via automated negotiation.

I always thought that all govt processes — high to low — should have an API for filing paperwork, with a publically available "wirk queue" that anyone could query. The govt would be mandated to use its own APIs, and motion in the queue would require publically available information.

It always ends up looking like a snazzier version of Brazil, in my head.

I assume you're referring to how AWS got started?