I’m kind of on Google’s side here. Especially during covid, chatting in IM essentially replaced hallway chatter. Nobody would want all of their verbal communications in an office being recorded on the record. Having IMs be off the record by default seems reasonable to me.
I get what you’re saying, but internal company communications (especially for publicly traded companies) still should be accessible to valid legal inquiries, otherwise there is absolutely no hope for any kind of accountability. Having IMs between end-users be off the record by default seems totally reasonable and good to me, but internal communications should not be deletable at all, let alone manually by executives. The US Government has record retention schedules, through which non-records (water-cooler talk or the digital equivalent) are kept private and real records are identified and preserved. This is the kind of thing that Congress needs to regulate for private companies. Google blatantly and actively deleted conversations they knew would be relevant to the case, that’s unacceptable.
