[otterley]

There is an important distinction that relates to a court’s ability to order a defendant to perform work to facilitate discovery. A court can order preservation of records, but they generally cannot order a defendant to create new ones. I was responding to your use of the word “collect,” which implies significantly more effort than merely not destroying logs (i.e. logging new information that they weren’t already).

It’s not misdirection or misleading; it lies in an understanding of the law. There’s plenty of case law out there on the subject if you’re interested.

[rpdillon]

Both are simply software changes. In one case, they're going to have to alter the software to not delete chats that users request to be deleted. In the other case, they'll alter the software to log new information. Neither of these are particularly difficult.

[otterley]

I understand, but the law still distinguishes between the two cases. In my experience, typically expunging is handled by a process separate from its creation (it depends on the logging framework, of course). And with the increasing trend of generated logs being ingested, processed, and stored by separate services, often disabling log deletion is a mere API call away.