Thterition Wr why nets

Some studies indicate that as much as $97\%$ of information and data generated by businesses is now generated in an electronic form. Information that exists

purely in a digital form can be destroyed in mass much more quickly than a comparable amount of paper information could be shredded or burned.

The legal and ethical duty to preserve electronically stored information $($ESI$)$ is governed by Federal Rules of Civil Procedure $37($e$).$ The rule empowers the court

to impose very severe sanctions $($even criminal penalties$)$ on a party for failing to properly preserve ESI.

However, now courts are dealing with ephemeral evidence $($discoverable evidence that has a fleeting existence$).$ Some companies are requiring employees to

communicate with applications such as Snapchat, Signal, WhatsApp, or Wickr$*-$these are platforms that are designed to destroy any trace of the message as soon

as it is read by the recipient $-$ instead of using email and text messages. Therefore, the contents of these messages cannot be recovered for discovery purposes in

litigation.

Is this a smart business move or unethical? Do you think it is comparable to destroying paper documents by shredding or burning $($which could be a crime$)?$ Why

or why not?