A former Twitter employee, Gary Rooney, won about $600,000 for unfair dismissal after Twitter assumed he resigned by not responding to Elon Musk’s “hardcore” work email.

The case highlighted the importance of clear communication between employers and employees, especially regarding significant changes in employment terms.

Rooney’s private Slack messages, where he discussed leaving, were used as evidence by Twitter, underscoring that internal communication on platforms like Slack is not always private and can be used in legal disputes.

  • Paddzr@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    But people don’t understand it.

    Hell, no email sent or received is yours and likely can never be truly deleted off your company’s exchsnge. Same with files etc.

    It’s not common knowledge, let’s not pretend it is and educate people.

    • bluGill@fedia.io
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      9 days ago

      Most companies have a strict policy to delete everything off of exchange after a few months unless there is a reason to keep it longer. You can’t bring up in court anything that wan daleted before you looked.

      • HeyJoe@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        I don’t think that’s true. We archive all email within the company as soon as it arrives. This is done to prevent an employee from deleting any evidence for many reasons that they may have. We are also on litigation hold which requires all data to be saved and since we can’t trust everyone to do this we are required to back up everything until we are told not to. We have used restored data many times for legal cases in the past.

        • ByteJunk@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          Where I work there is a data retention policy, and emails and other forms of communication (internal emails and slack, but even customer calls, etc) are deleted after a set amount of time, which varies depending on the rationale for storing that data.

          There’s many reasons to do this - limit disclosure issues in case of litigation, reduce storage costs, comply with PII rules around the world, etc. The guys in Legal have us file these loong ass forms about all this, including where the data is kept, security measures, etc etc etc.

          I’m shocked this isn’t common practice everywhere.

          • Silic0n_Alph4@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            There are two main types of data retention policy:

            • Retain everything to protect the company when the staff do something dodgy.
            • Delete everything to protect management when management do something dodgy.

            It’s a little more nuanced than that, of course, but in broad strokes that’s how I’ve seen it play out. Does the company want to pin the blame on somebody or shrug and say “we have no idea how that can have happened, guess we need to forget about it.”