I also worked at a fang company. When I was there they decided after losing a big govt case they would auto-delete your email after some number of months, like 6 months, plus they would limit your email storage to a small amount to force you to constantly delete things to send and receive email. They were careful to explain it wasn't to hide anything, it was IT efficiency or some bs. It was an exchange system, so you had to constantly delete your old email to free up space. Then the final piece of the puzzle was most of us were semi-randomly under the auspices of a giant lawsuit (imagine 1000 random developers in a division, everyone employed on xyz date is included). They told us to save relevant email to the lawsuit, without providing us any mechanism to do this, or clarifying what email is relevant. This was Microsoft 20 years ago.

They also told us about the cc the lawyer trick and that it wouldn't work. It was extremely clear they were trying to avoid recording conversations. It's many years later and my current employer auto-deletes slack messages after a week (so everyone copies them to google docs to save things). We waste a ton of time trying to save off important things. At the same time many many important communications seem to happen on slack. Plus we have zoom meetings, we can record them, but they get auto-deleted after some number of months.

We incentivized the lawyers to waste time of the engineers.

Big discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30760923

And this is different from...?

I agree that it's not what's intended for ACP. But lots of companies use it and don't bother to educate their employees on the rules of what constitutes appropriate usage of ACP tagging.

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Can confirm. Although… I was just told that if I had a legit question for a lawyer I should not worry about bothering them because it could shield the conversation.

I think I'm on googles side on this one. We can change the rule if we don't like it but it's more clever than anything abusive.

LOL, what's next, CCing a doctor or therapist so it's covered under HIPPA? If it worked for Tony Soprano...

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> The DOJ also said, "it is well settled that copying an attorney does not confer privilege" on its own.

One of my financial success goals was to have the lawyers that would be able to cite the case law supporting a statement like that.

I have that for some industries (and its a fools errand to have it for all industries all the time), and have learned a lot along the way. Its interesting to see organizations employ the utility of lawyers to this degree.

Aside from having reality shaping counsel, I like that it raises the cost of investigation by orders of magnitude. Makes the government think twice, or thrice, before inconveniencing anyone.