[brainpool]

Sounds wrong to me. Hiding chat logs or other business information from the company itself as well as customers (albeit suing ones) seem stupid. How would the company ever be able to audit its own operations? Getting sued is sometimes also not too bad as it can reveal bad practices within an organization. An analogy would be an X-ray, not entirely healthy but very revealing.

[closeparen]

Normal companies do not operate voice recorders in offices/conference rooms or even telephone wiretaps, except for specific regulated positions. Text may be more convenient to collect and search but I don’t think it’s morally any different.

[ska]

It doesn't matter what sort of business you are in, you need to have some ad-hoc communication that isn't part of a "permanent record", or else you incur communication friction everywhere.

Having it broken down by system is a pretty practical approach.