UK government MPs are using Signal’s automatic deletion feature

But it does. There's no expectation on politicians to record and publish their face-to-face one-on-one conversations.

How different is this from previous use of phone calls? I guess they can have many participants and stretch over much longer periods of time.

Government secrecy should be absolutely restricted by the general public - it is the beginning of all corruption of government. The UK headed down the wrong path towards totalitarian class-ist society when it decided the common people shouldn't know their own governments' secrets.

I’m in two minds about this. I think it’s pretty sleazy to be using signal to evade record keeping requirements. I also think it’s important to have transparency into things governments do.

But I also worry that such requirements can lead to worse results. Generally in a well run organisation, you want people to be able to speak their mind and disagree about things, but if the organisation makes a bad decision and those disagreements are recorded, they will be used against them.

For an arbitrary example, look at the Boeing 737 max. There were some internal emails claiming that the system which turned out not to be safe wasn’t safe (the problem with these was probably that they didn’t seem to make their way up to anyone who could change the decision), and probably the fallout from them will be worse than if there were no such emails and Boeing just appeared to not have considered the possibility of failure. This gives the message that one shouldn’t have these discussions through email because that gives the impression that known issues were ignored if they turn out to have mattered. But no one asked about the cases where people had raised concerns by email and they were corrected by redesigning things or where concerns were raised but deemed to not be significant and turned out not to be significant. It seems better to me for people to be able to voice disagreements.

Another example is in healthcare: I suspect people get worse outcomes because if anyone has a different (potentially better) opinion about how a patient may be treated, they are incentivised not to voice it because any disagreement in a hospitals records will make for a much stronger case in any litigation against a hospital.

Perhaps the issue is that the media or public inquiries (or maybe courts or juries) will look at any such record as a sign of negligence rather than an ordinary thing which happens all the time in cases that go wrong and right.

But maybe signal is really being used for political scheming and some public business overflows onto signal unintentionally.

I disagree entirely. Government must be conducted openly and with critical review by the people being governed, always. All government business should be logged and available for audit for years after the fact.

Otherwise, what we get is a totalitarian class society divided between 'those that know the secrets' and 'those that do not'.