That's nonsense. Even if the system does not explicitly create something called a "record" by the developers of the app, the conversation is in a written form and stored somewhere (the server's RAM, or whatever). That's a record, however brief it is. If you destroy it, you've just destroyed a record. It's as simple as that.
How is that different from a VOIP call? The communication of the call is transformed into digital data. Are all VOIP calls considered recorded, and the fact that you didn't actually use the "save the recording" feature means that you broke law (if you're under a order not to destroy recordings)?
And the argument seems to be that, if you have a series of 1s and 0s on disk or in memory at some point (because the information was transferred from one computer to another), then it counts as a written record. I'm trying to understand exactly what the difference is. Not in an "I'm trying to pedantic my way around the rule", but in a "these two things are the same; data representing communication between two or more people" way.
Nope. Just like a drawing made by depositing graphite on paper isn't drawing, even though writing letters by depositing graphite on paper is.
> Not in an "I'm trying to pedantic my way around the rule", but in a "these two things are the same; data representing communication between two or more people" way.
I wonder: if a meeting is held over Zoom (or whatever), and one participant turns on automatic captioning, does the resulting text that exists in their computer's memory constitute a "written record" that legally must be preserved?
Like phone calls, UDP packets carrying voice and video, those are all records also. A chat message packet seems to somehow be more special than a video or audio frame. That’s a bit weird to me.
Basically, you are saying that you can’t have a private conversation under a retention order unless computers aren’t involved.
