Sorry, did I commit fraud by discussing business over dinner without a stenographer present?
If you’re ordered to retain communications, sure. And in a civil court, it’s fair to conclude adversely if a party’s messages disappear suspiciously. But by the government? No.
Fair enough. The bar for intent should be high, though.
I use FaceTime Audio frequently for calls. Once I was asked to testify in respect of an investment fraud I prompted my firm to report. I got grilled for not being able to provide complete call logs. My concern is criminalising incomplete records creates the precedent of requiring them at all times.
In my experience, FaceTime Audio has time, date, and duration of calls, the same as for cellular calls. Neither cellular calls nor FaceTime calls have transcripts or recording functionality standalone on iOS or macOS, so your context is unclear, and your inability to provide complete call logs would definitely raise some questions in my opinion, although isn’t a red flag in and of itself.
The Phone app’s Recents tab on iOS, as well as the FaceTime app on macOS should have call log options. If you have iCloud backups enabled, Phone and FaceTime syncing is enabled by default, and if so, you can likely also get the info on iCloud.com unless you have the “Access iCloud Data on the Web” option disabled under Settings app -> Apple ID -> iCloud.
For what it’s worth anecdotally, I have info in my call log going back to 2022. If you have local backups via iTunes and/or Files app, you may also be able to find call logs. Apps such as iMazing Phone Evidence and other tools from that company are able to explore local backups and physically connected devices.
> Phone app’s Recents tab on iOS, as well as the FaceTime app on macOS should have call log options. If you have iCloud backups enabled, Phone and FaceTime syncing is enabled by default
Recents only goes back a few days. I don’t see Phone or FaceTime as options in my iCloud back-up, and there is no folder in Files corresponding to them. (Are you referring to iCloud Drive? I don’t have it enabled.)
Granted, there is a good chance I disabled something somewhere, because I’m not a fan of a tech company having more information than it needs on me.
I think your experience is normal. I have Advanced Data Protection enabled and all default iCloud backup settings enabled, so I may have a more inclusive backup than is the norm.
> I don’t see Phone or FaceTime as options in my iCloud back-up
It’s under Settings, then the top navigation [your Apple ID name] section above Airplane Mode which is the Apple ID settings -> iCloud -> Apps using iCloud -> Show All.
This Apple Support page may be helpful to you and others.
> Locate backups of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
> Find a list of your iOS or iPadOS backups on your Mac, PC, and iOS or iPadOS device. Learn how to delete backups, copy them, and more.
I assume this is a joke pointing to Google's chat app situation, but regardless here is my serious answer:
I don't think the executives need to do anything themselves at a company like Google -- whether it is their (managed) phone or laptop, likely the IT would install and set up these things and everything would be ready to use. If not they have assistants who can do the chores.
I use Signal by default for every piece of communication that I can. Am I somehow held to a different standard just because I was paranoid about surveillance from the start?
> Am I somehow held to a different standard just because I was paranoid about surveillance from the start?
Yes, how else could it work? For example if you have a policy to destroy CCTV footage at the end of the day then it’s not illegal to do that. If you have a policy to keep CCTV footage but when the police come and ask you some questions you delete it because you know that it contains evidence of a crime, that’s destruction of evidence. It’s not illegal to delete things, otherwise the world would run out of storage, it’s illegal to delete things to knowingly impede an investigation.
How is technical nature of your communication with others at all relevant? The court can order you to hand over the encryption keys, and if you destroy them, then it's the same thing as destroying the communication.
> I'm never talking to anyone over insecure channels again.
You can and should do this. No one will punish you for it in court unless you refuse to give them evidence that they have legally obtained.
I'm not sure why this is so complicated for you.
Let's say you murder someone with a knife, and you keep that bloody knife in a safe labeled, "Potential Evidence of Murder". A judge orders you to open the safe, and instead you incinerate it and everything inside it.
You wouldn't be punished for keeping your jewels in other safes. You'd be punished for committing a crime and then preventing a court from getting the evidence.
It's always weird when some tech nerds think they have some magic wand which avoids legal controls. A judge would just smack you down hard if this ever came to court, and your argument of well I special exception here due to technical barriers will just end up with you getting an adverse judgement or contempt charge depending on how flagrant it and if you had prior legal orders to the contrary.
If you're telling a judge "I specifically hide all written communication that I'm legally required to hold and produce so that you can't see it" you're gonna have a bad time.
Wouldn't be surprised. One startup I worked at launched their entire own separate private chat app/company and all of the execs and early employees used exclusively that software to communicate with each other, rather than email or the company slack.
If it was anything like the one I was at that did this, it’s because they had a weekly meeting where they reviewed the most salient points from the conversations taking place in slack and email.
I'm utterly appalled at how vigorously people are defending Google here. These are not the good guys. These aren't deserving of extra protection from the rabble. They can defend themselves in court with the billions of dollars they have. The kind of power and influence Google wields requires a higher standard. It's not being punished for success. It's ensuring that success doesn't allow them to subvert the law whenever they want. God forbid we have a functioning justice system anywhere.
A lot of them aren't so much actually defending Google here but eventually show they either a) think they're just smarter than the entire legal profession, or like eth_ below just hate the idea of law/government in general.
Punishing them solely for their success is unfair. If power accumulated through capturing natural monopolies is the issue, then we need to address that directly with public funding of open source and decentralized alternatives that can become the market standard. Not punish people who fill the gaps the public left, by effectively providing essential services.
I think you really ought to justify your use of the terminology "natural monopoly". To the extent that such a thing exists, is this not exactly what we have anti-trust laws to prevent?
It seems to me that we can, have, and should punish people for success if that success is likely to lead to well known kinds of market failure, and that such a policy is generally non-controversial outside of the most extreme forms of libertarian political philosophies (which unfortunately, are disproportionately prevalent in big tech and likely to get the whole industry in serious hot water).
Certainly, you could make the same "natural monopoly" argument against just about every serious anti-trust action that has taken place in the past. It didn't work then and I don't think its going to work now.
Pretending that closed platforms that exist on computer networks (and are not themselves networks) somehow makes this all different is not very convincing. Network effects, as we've come to understand the term, are not new, and have existed before computer networks. To the extent they exist, it's evidence of need for intervention because of a clear failure of a market to self regulate (what some may call a "natural" or just a regular monopoly) and maintain a competitive market, not evidence that everything is okay.
I also seriously take issue with the idea that Google provides an "essential service". Power, food, water, and you could make an argument for computer and communications infrastructure, are "essential". Google search is not. If it disappeared, society would soldier on and we would all be fine. At worst it would be a minor inconvenience for users and a headache for IT departments and developers.
I think anti-trust laws are unjust for precisely that reason: they punish people solely for being successful.
I also offered an alternative solution to private interests capturing natural monopolies: the state subsidizing a public option that can do that. My preference would be state funding for the development of open source software and decentralized platforms that can substitute for proprietary software and centrally managed platforms.
In fact, the state is ideally situated to fund this kind of public goods development, as it is the only legal entity with a broad enough tax collective apparatus to capture the gains from such investments.
As for essential/non-essential, perhaps you're right in terms of terminology. In any case, internet search is a widely used and extremely valuable service that enhances quality of life.
>such a policy is generally non-controversial outside of the most extreme forms of libertarian political philosophies (which unfortunately, are disproportionately prevalent in big tech and likely to get the whole industry in serious hot water).
Something being non-controversial doesn't make it right. It was uncontroversial anti-libertarian ideology that found a way to justify imprisoning hundreds of thousands of elderly people for a year during the COVID pandemic:
So this wasn't a natural monopoly because the high cost of entry isn't the sole or even arguably primary barrier to competition, and that's not the issue.
> Last time I heard it ppl were almost killed and whistle blowers were assassinated by suicide.
Not for nothing, but as a paramedic, the number of patients who've sworn black and blue that they're "no longer suicidal", "no longer a threat", "if anything happens to me, it definitely wasn't suicide" who ... went on to attempt or commit suicide in very short order is non-trivial.
> The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined 11 Wall Street banks and brokerages more than $1.8 billion in a long-anticipated move to curb finance employees’ use of unapproved messaging platforms and companies’ failures to keep accurate records of those communications, the regulators said Tuesday.
But it's not a "cool" tech company so you don't hear about it on HN.
> If you’re ordered to retain communications, sure. And in a civil court, it’s fair to conclude adversely if a party’s messages disappear suspiciously.
If you’re ordered to retain communications, sure. And in a civil court, it’s fair to conclude adversely if a party’s messages disappear suspiciously. But by the government? No.