Williams warns disappearing messages violate records retention laws

The New York City Department of Records and Information Services, DORIS, which apparently is the favorite of Gail Brewer,

2025 policy on instant electronic messages explicitly states that messages that document decisions, actions, or policies in an office or agency makes must be retained and preserved.

The policy further establishes that these offices and agencies must set procedures for gathering these messages, including but not limited to screenshots or exporting data.

This raises particular concerns when city employees or agencies use third-party messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal with automatic deletion or disappearing message features.

While these outside applications would be more than appropriate for personal communications, the message delete delegation...

Delegation feature violates public records and data retention laws.

These vanishing messages prevent government transparency, making public communication unrecoverable for freedom of information or open records requests.

Using these apps, even if no official records were deleted, raises questions at minimum in the public, and those are questions that should not need to be answered if the same permissible conversations occurred by other methods.

As public servants, I believe it is a best practice to not invite questions of secrecy in the course of doing our jobs.

There are a number of pieces of legislation from my colleagues, Councilmember Phileas Wong and Carr, that seem to address this.