True necessity of Records? [was: CryptoSeal]

[jamesd@echeque.com (James A. Donald)]

On 2013-10-26 02:56, Lance Cottrell wrote:
> It is not an easy problem. It is hard to make reliable and maintainable
> systems without keeping the kinds of logs and records that law
> enforcement might later want.
> Even if it is your policy to delete records, it is easy for a court to
> order you to maintain any records that you are producing.
> The only safe posture is to architect systems so as to never keep those
> records. Unfortunately that makes all kinds of other tasks more
> difficult. Therefor the whole service is more expensive to run, and may
> be less reliable.
> For a dedicated privacy service like Anonymizer, that is a reasonable
> tradeoff, but it will be a hard sell to phone companies and such.

A mountain of records is a pain, and makes stuff harder to find. 
Therefore automatic log rotation, where records that are unlikely to be 
of use are automatically deleted within a reasonable time, is optimal.

How many times have you gone looking for something, and there is a pile 
of crap?

OK, you could keep the pile of crap properly organized, but it is lot 
easier to just delete it than to properly organize it.