At my company (not finance, and never gotten sued), documents are ephemeral primarily due to GDPR reasons.

Many of them contain various personal data of clients and/or employees, legal makes us specify for how long each service needs to hold on to it, and purge as soon as possible to minimize chance of leaks.

It’s a funny intersection of hold requirements. Litigation and one set of compliance requires holding records for at least this much time, GDPR and other such things require keeping records no more than some particular time. I haven’t seen the case when the intersection is an empty interval. But I imagine then one would choose to justify breaking one of the least important ones.

GDPR Article 6, 1(c):

> Processing shall be lawful […] if […] processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject;

Ah perfect. Thanks for the reference.

It's where being able to have strong guarantees about how customer data is being used becomes critical.

I'm required to keep evidence about your KYC information and your financial transactions for compliance purposes for (e.g.) 7 years after you stop doing business with me. If I'm using them for that purpose I'd be in the clear GDPR-wise.

However, the day I break off doing business with you I need to stop using them for marketing or sales leads - that would be a GDPR breach.

Where I suspect it will get very messy for companies is the sexy new "hoover all the data into ML models" is going to come a GDPR cropper because I doubt most of the people doing it can show that they purged it when their relationship with the data owner ended, if they even had one in the first place. They're sure as fuck violating copyrights all over the place.

> Tech doesn’t seem to have reached that point just yet.

It's on a high speed train heading in that direction now.

Luckily for these companies, they are US based, and high speed rail doesn't really exist there.

Ouch

US trains derail before arrival.

As can be seen by the Madoff afair.

Finance is generally well regulated, tech is well.. not.

Which in some contexts makes sense. Losing all of your Facebook pictures is never going to be as devastating as losing your retirement.

I think its rather disingenuous or modest for tech to fall back on "whats the worst that can happen, maybe you lose some pictures from the cloud" as a defense for such a light touch.

There's many areas in which tech competes directly with, or has attempted to build shadow parallel systems to other more regulated industries - payments, exchanges, various medical plays, media, etc.

all of those "disruptors" just makes me cringe every time i hear it now. there have been so many bad actors. paypal still seizing accounts because some automated thing made a decision that can't be shared as to why. seems like Stripe as been in the news for similar topics. then you get the ones like Uber just flagrantly doing shady things to get that disruption.

now, when i hear someone say disrupt, i immediately assume they are cutting corners on whatever regulation that is needed to gain a leg up over the incumbent companies following the regulations.

Tech thinks it is "disruption" when they are breaking laws they don't like / they deem outdated / they deem "unfair" / that prevent them from making more money more quickly.

Tech wanted people to think this was different from Wall St somehow, but I think the average American no longer sees the difference.

Paypal and Stripe's actions like seizing accounts automatically is probably more due to complying to industry rules rather than avoiding them. The "shady" things are what any bank would have to do, not just the techs.

No way. Any time I've had a debit card shut off, they made several blatant attempts to contact me, and when I called them they immediately connected me to the fraud department to help solve the issue.

Getting a paypal/google/whatever account flagged is basically the death of that account.

You aren’t running a business, and you haven’t really dealt with your bank much beyond the e consumer level. They will cut you off as quickly as possible if they suspect anything nefarious going on. Banks are less reasonable than techs in this regards, you’ve just never used them to sell something.

>Banks are less reasonable than techs in this regards

Nonsense. Banks have someone you can get on the phone, usually 24/7. Good luck getting anyone at Google on the phone.

Really they don't. They will cut you off and then maybe take your phone call. Google and Apple don't actually run their own financial services, they partner with the banks that you think are actually better, but aren't really.

> now, when i hear someone say disrupt, i immediately assume they are cutting corners on whatever regulation that is needed to gain a leg up over the incumbent companies following the regulations.

This is.. not new at all. We were talking about Uber doing that about a decade ago lol.

> There's many areas in which tech competes directly with, or has attempted to build shadow parallel systems to other more regulated industries - payments, exchanges, various medical plays, media, etc.

If we are just talking about the USA, then I think both Apple and Google had to partner with entities in the financial industries to do payments, they didn't just bypass regulation in those industries. Then there is Stripe and Square (erm, whatever Square is called now), I'm not sure what regulations they fall under.

Are you suggesting that you want the government to have accessible recordings of medical conversations?