Uber's use of encrypted messaging may set legal precedents
Edit: For people bringing up Sarbanes-Oxley, I will paste a comment made by a user in this thread (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15827298" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15827298</a>)<p>> "This is not even a little bit true. What you're implying is that businesses are required by law to keep all internal communications in case someday there's litigation, and that is just flatly false.
Deleting data once litigation has been initiated is tampering/obstruction. Deleting data when not under litigation is the company's choice, with very few exceptions. Many companies explicitly require all communication be ephemeral - email, messaging, etc. it explicitly only preserved for X days and then deleted entirely from all systems."<p>"That they were so concerned about covering things up meant that they could have known what they were doing was a crime"<p>When the government says "Only criminals want privacy. Why do you care about privacy if you're doing nothing wrong", every one is up in arms (and rightly). What happened now?<p>"However, companies have an obligation to preserve records that may be reasonably seen as relevant to litigation. Chat logs that could help get to the bottom of the trade secrets case are now inaccessible"<p>Why does someone automatically have a right to know what communication took place just because that knowledge would help incriminate the communicator?<p>There seems to be a double standard in the community here when it comes to privacy. Usually, everyone's all gung-ho about privacy and encrypted communication and VPNs that don't keep logs. At that time, no one seems to be concerned about who is using that encrypted channel and for what purpose. But now suddenly Uber did it and it's bad?