VNG Realisatie has published a guide on archiving SMS messages and services such as WhatsApp by municipalities. The guide offers action perspectives and outlines approaches.
Furthermore, this guide fleshes out the choices of the National Archives' Information Sheet on archiving chat messages for municipalities. This takes into account the specific starting points of the municipalities, including the common selection list used by the municipalities.
On March 20, 2019, the Administrative Law Division of the Raad van State (RvS) issued a ruling on whether the Government Information (Public Access) Act applies to text and WhatsApp messages. The ruling is clear: text and WhatsApp messages about an administrative matter are subject to the Wob, regardless of whether these messages are on the business or private phone of a director or civil servant. This means that these must now be included in a Wob request. And that administrative bodies must ensure that there can be no prejudice to the claims to public access to documents that can be derived from the Wob. Before that, it was already known that text messages count as records as referred to in the 1995 Archives Act. Yet text messages are often not properly archived. The RvS ruling underscores the importance of archiving text messages.
View: Guide to archiving text messages
Source: VNG Realization
