Comment by noirscape
3 years ago
I think there's some overlap with recording phone calls here; some people do it, but do you need to get consent for doing it?
Laws tend to vary quite a bit, but around here (not US or a lawyer, get your legal advice from someone else), you're allowed to record phone calls without mentioning it beforehand as long as you're a participant in the call itself.
Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties.
> Basically the law surrounding phone call recordings suggests that for all intents and purposes, that right belongs to both entities independently. I'd apply the same to chat messages; the right to store them without prior consent belongs effectively to both parties.
Note however, that the law around mail and postal services suggests no such thing - on the contrary, once you send something, you lose your rights to it; you may have some residual rights for the duration of delivery, since the post is performing a service for you, but once the mail reaches its destination, its owned by the recipient.
Chat messages derive from physical mail, not phone calls, so I'd apply postal rather than telecom perspective here. Phone calls are in some sense unique here: in its first widespread form, making a phone call meant creating a literal, direct electrical connection between your microphone and a speaker on the other end - an unbroken conduit going for dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of kilometers - in order to "teleport" the sound waves by means of converting mechanical waves to electrical waves, and back again at the other end - allowing to have a conversation across distance by pretending it isn't there. Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation - as opposed to written messages, whose analogues were sent over a telegraph.
Thus, in my mind, the right framework to think about IM chats and e-mails alike is through analogy to written letters and "snail mail" (if you really insist e-mails and IMs are not alike, then treat e-mails as similar to letters, and IM chats as similar to tiny notes passed around in the class by children, while the teacher is not looking). For phone calls, the right analogy is conversation. That extends to VOIP, Teams calls, Mumble/Teamspeak, etc. If you want digital voice communication that has semantics of mail, and not conversation, then we have that too: it's called voice messages, and is a feature in most IM platforms.
To spell out clearly what that last point means to me: mutual consent for call recording sounds reasonable. But if you send me a voice recording over Messenger or WhatsApp, to me it's just as if you sent a normal chat - and therefore something that I'm free to back up without your consent or even without informing you.
> Chat messages derive from physical mail, not phone calls
Chat messages are not physical things and trying to apply laws that are based on important distinctions with regards to physical things to features in an application is not useful. Even then, you can still send someone something but retain rights over it.
> Those first phone calls were direct evolution of spoken conversation
Frankly I find it a little weird that a fast back and forth chat on discord over the internet is being likened more to sending a physical bit of paper with delays of multiple days per message than a chat over the phone.
First letter: Hi. Do you have a minute
Reply: Yes. What is it?
Second letter: I've got a problem.
Reply: Is this on the new product?
And it's a week later.
The name of it is even a chat message. To say chat messages are not like a chat is weird to me just because they're not audio files.
I strongly think either comparison is irrelevant but I'm quite surprised at the distinction you're trying to draw.
Worth remembering what the start of this was though, which was that deleting messages on discords servers was described as a feature.
In Washington, USA, both parties need to be aware of the recording. It's why many IVR systems announce "this call may be recorded".