It does record "history" - if it didn't, the recipient would see it appear and then immediately vanish in the next refresh of the screen, which is not the case. The thing is, it only keeps the history for a short period of time (hours/days). That's not the same thing as an unrecorded call, which isn't recorded for any period at all.

That is understood. However the medium begets a conversation around how most communication isn't recorded anyways, in this example if it were a phone call.

I don't think I understand what you're trying to say. Could you please rephrase/clarify?

Most communication isn’t recorded? I suspect that’s not accurate.

Mail, messages, chat, ticketing systems…phone calls are definitely an outlier in my world. Even face to face is rare.

But it’s not, which is the point. It’s a chat with a recorded history, whose history gets deleted after some time.

If you have two internal phone systems, one of which logs calls and is the default, the legal system would look on moving to the other unrecorded system in the middle of a call with the same kindness. Intent matters in law and the intent was to evade evidence rules.

> the legal system would look on moving to the other unrecorded system in the middle of a call with the same kindness.

I don’t know about that. Not producing evidence and destroying evidence are very different actions, even though the intent (of not leaving evidence) is similar.

In the US, moving conversations from a recorded to an unrecorded medium would likely be covered under the 5th. Having conversations on a recorded medium then destroying the record, not so much.

No, the chat system recorded history for 24 hours and then deleted it. Google had a legal obligation to proactively find and turn off all the automatic deletion system that could delete potentially relevant records. That's just how the law works, every big corp knows how to do it.