Ah, I missed that part, that's a very compelling argument. I disagree these are not language games though. The way the chat application was kept from preserving history is an implementation detail that doesn't reflect the action the user of the chat performed in the UI.

It sounds like the truth is whatever a human judge can be convinced into deciding is true.

I mean, that’s literally the judges job. It’s why they are called a judge. They make a judgement as to where the truth lies, and where the law lies (except for issues that are delegated to a jury, in which case the jury is responsible for determining the factual record).

But, yes, judges make judgements and a lot of the “well, technically” semantic games that people play will be met with an annoyed scowl and a negative opinion (but, critically not all semantic games; there are some semantic differences that are of critical importance to a judge)

If there is a court order to not delete history, then the application was designed to do the opposite, and if a technical detail meant the application could not be changed, then the only way to respect the order would have been to stop using the chat application. Instead, there was a decision to use it more ...

An analogous real-world situation would be a meeting in a room where someone uses the whiteboard to draw some diagrams and erases it at the end. If we apply the same logic, you would be under obligation to take pictures of the whiteboard and send them to the court? Or even that you should record the whole meeting? Something just doesn't feel right with the idea that you can be under obligation to help make a case against yourself in a legal proceeding.

Well that’s kind of the whole thing with discovery - the court is asking the company to disclose relevant information (some of which will be against the company). Companies here have different disclosure requirements to an ordinary individual.

And if new evidence is being created, that new evidence would be subject to the same data request.

> I don't see how the users of the chat application can be expected to be aware of the implementation or proactively find ways for these private conversations to be recorded.

Most corporate messaging apps have built in functionality to handle litigation holds. This is a requirement for legal compliance, so the company would have to train and brief employees on their legal responsibilities to not destroy evidence during the litigation.

See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/e... or https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/articles/4401830811795-Cre... or https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7657594?hl=en

Which conversations are subject to legal hold would be discussed in court.

Are you literally appointed by the Pope? Part of the process of canonisation?

The company must educate its employees because the company has obligations. A limited-liability corporation is a legal fiction granted extraordinary protections by a society. That corporation had damned well better be a good citizen of that society. If that means erring on the side of caution? Good.

Maybe? The line is more blurry here, but there are probably cases where it's more or less easy to make the distinction.

If data is recorded on a permanent medium, it can be arbitrarily retrieved, an explicit delete operation is needed to get rid of it, and this deletion can be scheduled to happen at an arbitrary time - that might easily be understood as "destroying evidence".

If you want asynchronous communication, you will need to produce records of some kind, which can be evidence. That's nothing new.

Maybe if you have a system where the information must be exchanged live and falls off a cliff immediately no matter if it was observed or not, say, like a video conferencing tool - I wonder how the courts see that. It gets much closer to an interesting edge case than something with a 24-hour retention policy.

That's not permanent.

If this would be detrimental to your case, perhaps stop doing shady shit.

That such cases can exist doesn't mean it's not clear-cut here.

In the vast majority of cases, two engineers will agree on the question "is this data persisted or ephemeral" and the fact that the line is blurry doesn't mean we can't know when it's been crossed.