When is a business chat a record? That question has plagued my consulting practice since I first collected and processed native email for a client back in 1993. Now your policies, protocols and security controls have to address multiple chat apps that support ‘vapormail’ disappearing messages. WhatsApp adds this capability to over 2 BILLION users. When you add FaceBook, Instagram, Signal, Viber and WeChat Recall users you can imagine that most of your employees have access to a free chat app that will vanish conversations and attachments. At least the users think that they are gone. We can recover deleted chat messages and files from iOS and Android phones via forensics and even simple recovery apps. So are the ‘disappearing media’ actually ‘double deleted’ from the device logs? Looking forward to some sharp forensics person running some recovery tests and publishing the results.