Should New York Be Deleting State Workers' Email Automatically After 90 Days?

The legislators were annoyed. The state official testifying before them did not have many answers. And the subject of her appearance — the “multiyear transformation” of New York’s information technology system — had been pretty much cast aside.

 

Instead, the official, Maggie Miller, newly appointed as chief information officer, faced a barrage of questions on a newly delicate matter: Why had Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration put in place a policy of automatically deleting state workers’ emails after 90 days?

“All I can say is that I fully support the policy,” Ms. Miller told one lawmaker at the hearing on Feb. 26.

Another asked her whether “any other government, anywhere” had a comparable policy; she cited no government, nowhere. And she was also asked: Who came up with the idea in the first place?

“It was already in place, I’m afraid, so I don’t know,” she replied.