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).Companies are requiring employees to communicate with applications such as Snapchat, Signal, or Wickr -platforms that are designed to destroy any trace of the message as soon as it is read by the recipient, instead of via email and text messages.Therefore, the contents of these messages cannot be recovered for discovery purposes.

Is this a smart business move or unethical? Is it comparable to destroying paper documents by shredding or burning which is a crime?