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posted by janrinok on Monday April 02 2018, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the pretend-it-never-happened dept.

According to Facebook employees who spoke with the New York Times, staffers are also urging the company to hunt down the leakers who released the Bosworth memo.

If the report is accurate, the deletion of internal communications could have legal implications, including in an ongoing Federal Trade Commission investigation into the company’s data-handling practices. Destruction of internal documents was a partial focus of the FTC’s recent investigation of Volkswagen.

Bosworth’s memo continued catastrophic PR fallout following findings that the Facebook data of as many as 50 million users was wrongly harvested by the election consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. In the memo leaked Thursday, Bosworth wrote that “connecting people” should be the company’s driving goal, even if “it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies” or “someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”


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  • (Score: 2) by MrGuy on Monday April 02 2018, @03:52PM (6 children)

    by MrGuy (1007) on Monday April 02 2018, @03:52PM (#661529)

    As electronic communications more and more become the default form of "communication" in business environments, and as technology becomes more and more a part of every company, it's amazing to me that more companies don't mandate training for all employees in document management and retention.

    I don't mean passing out an impenetrable PDF from legal as part of the orientation packet and making everyone initial a document acknowledging receipt of it. I mean actual training.

    How long is e-mail retained by default (hint - this should never be "forever"? How can I archive something to be retained longer? And in what circumstances is that appropriate? What should I do if I receive a message that I worry is inappropriate or might reflect negatively on the company (hint - the answer is never "delete it and pretend you didn't see it). Under what circumstances is it appropriate to delete archived information on my machine? What should I do if the company is subject to a legal investigation?

    People deleting information that by law is required to be retained to support an investigation is problematic. But if the company has a lax culture of compliance, it's 10x worse - you can't argue some employees did something inadvertently when you could-have-but-didn't train them on doing the right thing.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @04:07PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @04:07PM (#661543)

    Until then, those papers and effects in question are the sole property of the owner to do with what he/it will, including to destroy them.

    That being said, someone of renown once said "Don't put anything in writing."

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MrGuy on Monday April 02 2018, @04:25PM (4 children)

      by MrGuy (1007) on Monday April 02 2018, @04:25PM (#661553)

      This is exactly the kind of simplistic and wrong answer that proves my point.

      IANAL, but as far as I'm aware, the legal standard for document retention is whether a company "knew or should have known that the documents would become material at some point in the future then such documents should have been preserved." That quote is from Lewy v. Remington Arms (Remington deleted information on customer complaints that would later prove material in a lawsuit.)

      An active lawsuit or investigation triggers some specific retention requirements, but it's not the sole determining factor on whether you're free to delete something.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @04:31PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @04:31PM (#661556)
        • The government doesn't give a shit about the Constitutional requirements of due process.

        • Law, as determined by legislators or Judges, is so loosey goosey as to be basically meaningless; you can reduce all governmental law to "At any given time, the Masters say what's what, and you're not a Master."

        • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday April 02 2018, @06:46PM

          by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday April 02 2018, @06:46PM (#661617) Journal
          • The government doesn't give a shit about the Constitutional requirements of due process.Constitution

          FTFY

      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday April 02 2018, @06:17PM (1 child)

        by bob_super (1357) on Monday April 02 2018, @06:17PM (#661600)

        My previous multi-billion-dollar company mandated all email be deleted after 3 years, under specifically listed as needed.
        It was a nice CYA.
        Made life a lot harder for those of us who needed to keep stuff discussed and agreed with third-parties at the start of long projects.

        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday April 02 2018, @09:35PM

          by frojack (1554) on Monday April 02 2018, @09:35PM (#661674) Journal

          The law in most places doesn't mandate retention or forbid deletion, it merely requires a written policy covering retention.
          If your policy is to delete and purge backups after three years, that's fine. Our company did that as well - but it got messy after a while as some government contracts required longer retention for project related memos, and email.

          However, once the subpoena or lawsuit is served, all bets are off. Because at that point in time everything you have on file is "discover-able" and you better have it on file.

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.