US Agencies Warn Companies Against Deleting Messages On Slack, Signal & WhatsApp

A recent trend has been seen in which employees prefer using instant messaging at work instead of the traditional system of emails. Federal antitrust enforcers have recently issued a warning according to which, the companies that are under investigation, must turn over those records. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have announced that they are tweaking the language they send to companies under investigation in order to make it clear that they are required to preserve and hand over the chats from instant messaging platforms and ephemeral messaging apps. The messaging apps which come under these categories primarily are Salesforce Inc.’s Slack, WhatsApp and Signal.

The agencies reiterated that failure to preserve those messages might lead to fines or even criminal charges for destroying documentation, according to a Bloomberg report. 

This announcement comes in view of antitrust enforcers raising concerns in recent cases about the deletion of chats and messages.

Impact On Giants — Google & Amazon

The US Justice Department has asked the federal judge who is overseeing its antitrust suit against Alphabet Inc.’s Google to issue sanctions against the latter for failing to preserve internal communications of employees. Earlier last year, a different federal judge reprimanded Google’s top lawyer, Kent Walker, over the company’s record-keeping practices which ultimately led to the destruction of messages on Google Chats.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, the Federal Trade Commission accused Amazon employees including founder and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos of using the messaging app Signal in order to hide communications from the regulator, which was investigating the company for antitrust violations. The e-commerce giant in response to this denied all allegations and said that its employees did not delete any message. It added that the company informed the FTC about the Signal usage and “painstakingly collected Signal conversations from its employees’ phones, and allowed agency staff to inspect those conversations.”