(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


POLITICO Europe: Top Boris Johnson aide turned on disappearing WhatsApps weeks before COVID inquiry unveiled | Politicians & Civil Servants surrender many rights to commence work; perhaps privacy shou

2023-10-30 23:53:06+00:00

Other countries have legislation on records retention and they arrange matters so that records of communication are well-kept; in the UK it’s essentially at the discretion of the individuals who are assumed to be good chaps or chapesses, which of course is never any longer the case as far as can be seen.

Certainly they should not be trying to drag down the privacy of all the world’s secure messengers in order to solve their own problems with privacy.

In an evidence session with Reynolds Monday, the former civil servant said he couldn’t recall why he’d turned on the disappearing messages function in the group he set up. The feature deletes all messages sent from that point after seven days — meaning texts sent after April 15 in the group no longer exist and cannot be scrutinized by the inquiry. “I can guess or I can speculate, but I cannot recall exactly why I did so,” Reynolds said when pressed on the move. He argued that most of the government-related content in the group was copied and pasted from emails. https://www.politico.eu/article/boris-johnson-aide-martin-reynolds-turn-on-disappearing-whatsapp-messages-covid-inquiry-loomed/

Less whimsically: disappearing messages are a great idea for informational hygiene, but not so much for Government records retention. All the more reason, then, that ministers should be banned and sanctioned from using any messenger that does not log their official communications content for the duration of their post.
[END]

[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/108097
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

DropSafe Blog via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/alecmuffett/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.