A former Twitter employee, Gary Rooney, won about $600,000 for unfair dismissal after Twitter assumed he resigned by not responding to Elon Musk’s “hardcore” work email.
The case highlighted the importance of clear communication between employers and employees, especially regarding significant changes in employment terms.
Rooney’s private Slack messages, where he discussed leaving, were used as evidence by Twitter, underscoring that internal communication on platforms like Slack is not always private and can be used in legal disputes.
Where I work there is a data retention policy, and emails and other forms of communication (internal emails and slack, but even customer calls, etc) are deleted after a set amount of time, which varies depending on the rationale for storing that data.
There’s many reasons to do this - limit disclosure issues in case of litigation, reduce storage costs, comply with PII rules around the world, etc. The guys in Legal have us file these loong ass forms about all this, including where the data is kept, security measures, etc etc etc.
I’m shocked this isn’t common practice everywhere.
There are two main types of data retention policy:
It’s a little more nuanced than that, of course, but in broad strokes that’s how I’ve seen it play out. Does the company want to pin the blame on somebody or shrug and say “we have no idea how that can have happened, guess we need to forget about it.”
I think that’s an understandable position but IT is ruled in a cost benefit analysis for many small to medium sized businesses, so I am sure if it’s as common practice there