The auto-deleting chat criticism is a bit weird to me. Every big corporation I've worked for (four of them -- including Google -- as an employee, and maybe two dozen more as a contractor/consultant) has had automatic email deletion policies, and before that they had policies requiring memos and other written communications to be shredded/burned. Offices had boxes with slots in them that you dumped documents in and the contents were collected and destroyed daily. Automatic deletion of chats seems like a straightforward extension of typical American corporate policy. I'm not saying such policies are "right", just that they're routine. They're routine, of course, because the US is a very litigious country.
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But maybe there's some nuance to Google's actions that I've missed.
Google’s email (when I was there, I was a layoff victim ~2 years back) has something like a year long self delete policy, and anything you apply an archive tag to gets kept “forever”. So it is modestly durable. Plus of corse if Google gets sued and you or a work area you are involved in gets identified as a discoverable asset you get to be on discovery hold and all the mail gets retained until that process is over (and it can last years or decades).
Google’s chats self deleted in more like 45 to 90 days. Seldom long enough to survive into a litigation hold. The chats didn’t have an archive hold tag you could apply (one of the chat systems had a possibly accidental loophole, groups had their own retention policies settable per group, so if you had stuff you wanted to save you could make a group to discuss a document or design and set a year retention policy or whatever).
Google also quite deliberately had internal communications about “communicate with care” and pushed employees to discuss things in person and via chat and not email if it was business related as opposed to purely technical. It was very obvious we were being told to communicate anything that might be the topic of a lawsuit over chat (or in person) and never email. Durability of the messages and discoverability was mentioned. It wasn’t “do all the illegal stuff in chat”, it was “be aware that business practices can be very legally sensitive and are best conducted in person or if by electronic means in chat and never in email”, very nudge-nudge-wink-wink.
I mean nothing strictly illegal about reminding people what forms of communication work how, and all the documents had a retention policy, it just happened that the policy was generally “burn in a month and a half” which for a typical business would be very very suspicious.
To give Google a little break though with the volume of business Google use to conduct via email it is extremely different from companies that one would accuse of being shady with a 45 day burn policy: most traditional companies have “some” email, Google like many tech companies and especially tech companies where most of the management layers were ex-technical did communications relentlessly by email. At most phone companies if it would have been a phone call it would be an email chain. Meetings well, google still has way too many, but meetings got summarized in email (frequently by several people). If it happened it was probably in at least 8 if not 300 emails.
Post chat change though, things got memory holed. If it happened maybe there is an email, maybe. Likely lots of chat about it, all vanished into the mists go time (45 days back). Aruments about the 300th time a button name got changed? Chat, maybe a little email. Discussions about who a “target audience” for a product was? Absolutely in chat, never in email. Never never, never ever in email. What kind of user does a proposed feature appeal to? All chat, never email...