Forum Discussion
Preventing Teams private messages from eDiscovery
Of course I'm aware that Teams private messages are stored and are searchable with an eDiscovery search. Our problem is that our CEO doesn't want this, and he refuses to use Teams for this very reason. He wants his private messages to be just that - private. As long as a global admin can run an eDiscovery search, even if doing so is logged and audited, he won't use Teams.
Is there any way to make Teams messages ACTUALLY private and keep them outside of the scope of what an eDiscovery search can find? I'm the 365 admin for our company and personally I feel the same way. People's private chats should be private. Yes, of course, it's a business account, so everyone should conduct themselves professionally, etc. But regardless, we'd like to be able to setup our Teams so that anything said in a private message is untraceable. Can this be done?
4 Replies
You can configure Search filters as detailed here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/permissions-filtering-for-content-search?view=o365-worldwide
Since the messages are technically accessed from the Exchange mailbox, the filter should cover said mailboxes.
Or go the other end of the spectrum and configure a retention policy to purge them every day.
VasilMichev None of these options actually prevent Teams private messages from being eDiscovery-searchable in the first place though, which is what we're looking for.
KM2002 Set a one day retention policy, so that all messages are deleted, then they won't exist in the eDiscovery archive. If the messages exist they are searchable, the only way to limit that is not having them any longer.
