I wonder why should email be different (why should you change the expiration policy?) Is it explicitly called out in some law that it has to be treated differently? What about if you always use a service that auto-deletes communication every few hours (and it is well-known that this is what the service does and you have no control over it), will that be treated like you are using the phone service for communication?
I think the right question is, "Why should a phone call be different?" What intrinsic quality of a phone call makes it not subject to data retention, whereas an E-mail or a text message would be?
Not sure what you mean -- everyone knows that a phone call is not routinely recorded and there is no expectation that it be recorded when an investigation is on and businesses routinely use a mix of phone calls and emails (and other means) for communication. Why should there be a "by default" expectation that you would increase retention just because there is an investigation in progress (which is why I asked if there is some explicit law/requirement for emails).
And the answer boils down to: in a phone call you can blurt out shit such that, if it were written down in an edit window, you wouldn't click "Send".
Also: a phone call can capture surrounding audio not intended to be part of the phone call. That audio can either leak information itself, or reveal the originator's location.
These are post-facto justifications that are not sound because the same concerns don't hold for other mediums. You can write shit you would regret later in emails too.
And privacy should NOT be about just protecting you from shit that you might regret.
Suppose that instead of using e-mail or instant messaging you use BSD ntalk, where every keystroke you type is immediately seen by the other party; they can see you backspacing over everything, fixing typos, rewording. You are saying that you will not say less shit in ntalk than in an e-mail?
It's not a question of what medium will make me more likely to say shit. It's a question of whether my choice of that medium should be, de facto, considered incriminating. It's a question of whether a company can ask its employees to use ephemeral mediums to communicate.
See, if we get down to brass tacks, I personally would be willing to put my money on Uber being guilty as sin.
But that doesn't mean that I think a company should not be allowed to ask employees to prefer a confidential or ephemeral medium of communication.
a phone call can capture surrounding audio not intended to be part of the phone call. That audio can either leak information itself, or reveal the originator's location.
Most people delete their email messages as soon as they read it. This has been changing in the last few years as storage becomes cheap enough that it is possible to save everything, but most people are still subject some sort of maximum bytes in saved messages. (gmail was an early pioneer in the never delete space so some of you might be used to this)
