10 ms·

All the large tech companies train their employees how to request advice from counsel and use privileged and confidential email communication. I've never worke

by efitz 5y ago

All the large tech companies train their employees how to request advice from counsel and use privileged and confidential email communication. I've never worked for Google but worked for two of the other MAGMAs and it was pretty standard. Nothing I saw about the training or common usage seemed suspicious; I think it's in the eye of the beholder. After several big companies got their internal email used against them in lawsuits, esp. antitrust lawsuits, they focused heavily on training employees how and when to discuss sensitive topics related to competition, e.g. "don't say exaggerated things like "we're going to kill the competition", etc. And the trainings emphasize being extremely accurate and precise, and not speculating as to legality unless you actually are a corporate counsel. They teach you to take such questions to corporate counsel, e.g. "We're thinking about doing X, what do you think?" on P&C email threads. I'm sure that some people could overuse this, but again, I didn't see anything suspicious, and I remember seeing one guy get called down for addressing email to corporate counsel as P&C and not actually asking a question. I'm sure in every org there are weasels who would try to misuse this, but I'd have to see more evidence before I would believe that this was cultural at Google.

BurningFrog 5y ago
When I joined Google in 2006, the message was "don't write anything in an email you don't want to see in a NYT headline". Good advice for all digital communications. You have to assume the authorities, and others, are listening.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  "You have to assume the authorities, and others are listening" doesnt this seem sort of outrageous to an outsider, since Google pioneered the practice of searching every user's emails? like, they dish it out but also hide their own ? Secondly the extreme and secretive legal agreement not to talk about your work, even years after leaving the company.. it seems Google got away with a lot, by virtue of "superpowers" that is objectionable for good reason, for the business community in general.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    It seems more like they applied to everyone the same standard that was applied to them.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      non-private email is a cynical mouse trap then, eating your customers privacy for your billions in ad profits.. how is that for "standard"?
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >You have to assume the authorities, and others, are listening. Given that Google is a publicly traded company and thus has to follow federal securities laws and keep much business communication on the books anyway I don't know why we're framing this as 'the government may be listening'.
- wiz21c 5y ago
  "don't write anything in an email you don't want to see in a NYT headline" If I got something like that, I sure want to tell the NYT...
  - navbaker 5y ago
    But there is nothing suspicious or sensational about that advice! It's a short, concise way of warning employees of really any business that electronic communication never goes away and to be mindful of how they communicate.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    Believe it or not, during my years at Google, I was never part of anything remotely illegal. I was part of a fair amount of silly jokes and occasional gossip that, out of context, could have looked pretty bad.
    - wiz21c 5y ago
      I don't have any doubt that none of what Google does is illegal. Same goes for 99% of the employers I had. But illegality is not the only reason things end up on NYT. For example, my former boss was clearly using his positions in various nationwide institutions to make sure things were discussed the way he wanted to. Depending on the institutions (for example being in an audit one as a "consultant" and another one being audited as a "chief-whatever-officer" is not illegal but it's downright suspicious) I never said anything about it but the newspapers caught up...
singron 5y ago
It makes sense to ask your lawyer legal questions, but I think this complaint is more about CCing lawyers on sensitive communications so you can write "Attorney Client Privileged" despite not actually wanting to discuss the matter with your attorneys. I'm almost surprised they didn't just put a lawyer on every mailing list and put the magic words in a mandatory footer.
- efitz 5y ago
  IANAL, but the trainings I took emphasized that regardless of the P&C label, it was NOT P&C if you weren't asking the lawyer a question, and any part of the discussion that happened before someone engaged counsel was not P&C. We also were instructed not to add people to such threads, but rather request that the lawyer do it.
  - robrenaud 5y ago
    I am also not a lawyer, but I definitely saw a lot of a behavior where one would CC lawyer cat, and start the email with "please advise" on emails that contained sensitive information but no legal questions. It bothered me a little, but I also wanted to be able to discuss sensitive numbers in emails and also be productive, so I kinda ignored it.
- aikinai 5y ago
  No one does this and the training specifically says it won't work. You have to address the communication directly to the counsel with a specific question. And if there are too many people in the CC, that's also evidence that it wasn't really a question to counsel and it would be deprivileged.
  - droopyEyelids 5y ago
    That's exactly what the government is asking for. Per the article: >The government wants access to email chains where attorneys were copied, but never responded. so it sounds like an existing thread, where someone threw legal on the cc list after, and legal never felt it was appropriate to respond.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> All the large tech companies train their employees how to request advice from counsel and use privileged and confidential email communication What is described here is not training on “how to request advice from counsel and use privileged and confidential email communication”, it is direction to pretextually pantomime requesting advice of counsel for all discussion touching on certain topics in an effort to provide a pretextual fig leaf for deliberately withholding nonprivileged information expected to be relevant to future litigation with a premeditated false privilege claim.
berberous 5y ago
Did you read the linked government brief? I don’t trust the brief to not be misleading, but reading it at face value is pretty damning.
- s17n 5y ago
  The brief accurately describes Google training ("if you're discussing anything that might possibly be a sensitive issue, make sure to add an attorney to the thread and seek their advice"), as did the parent comment. I've never worked at any other big company but the whole thing did feel like a standard corporate practice. In the long run, companies are just going to get more and more aggressive with their retention policies, so all this will be irrelevant.
  - TechBro8615 5y ago
    “It’s not wrong if it’s standard practice” has become, dare I say it, the standard response to all sorts of misconduct in our industry. It should be obvious that standard and illegal practices are not mutually exclusive.
wdr1 5y ago
> MAGMA Out of curiosity, why do some people change "F" to "M" for Facebook to Meta, but leave the "G" there for Google?
- analog31 5y ago
  Because Google's name change happened long enough ago, that nobody remembers it.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Out of curiosity, why do some people change "F" to "M" for Facebook to Meta, but leave the "G" there for Google? Google is still a major tech company, though it is a subsidiary of Alphabet, while Facebook is now a product (not a subsidiary firm) of Meta, as I understand it.
- paxys 5y ago
  They are both very different kinds of restructures. Alphabet is a pure holding company. It doesn't have many employees directly working for it (other than top executives, some finance people and other minor overhead). And different Alphabet companies operate fully independently with next to zero sharing of employees, resources, money or tech. When people in these threads say Google, they specifically mean the company which makes up most of Alphabet and works on search, ads etc., not Calico or DeepMind. Meta on the other hand is a rebrand of Facebook (the company). There is no holding structure. If you were a Facebook employee, you now work for Meta. Employees at Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus, shared infra teams, and other minor projects all work for Meta as well. Facebook now refers to just the app, nothing else. The different brands are simply products that the company works on, not legal entities in themselves.
  - toast0 5y ago
    > Meta on the other hand is a rebrand of Facebook (the company). There is no holding structure. If you were a Facebook employee, you now work for Meta. Employees at Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus, shared infra teams, and other minor projects all work for Meta as well. It doesn't make much difference to your line of reasoning, but at least WhatsApp operates as wholy owned subsidiaries, so there is some amount of holding company; note that the terms of service of Instagram are between users and Meta, but tos for WhatsApp is between users and WhatsApp LLC or WhatsApp Ireland Limited depending on the country code of the registered number. Note: I worked for WhatsApp until 2019; I don't know if WA Ireland is a subsidiary of WA LLC or Meta. There's some other overseas WhatsApp legal entities as well, although I don't have a list.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by efitz 5y ago

BurningFrog 5y ago

When I joined Google in 2006, the message was "don't write anything in an email you don't want to see in a NYT headline". Good advice for all digital communications. You have to assume the authorities, and others, are listening.

mistrial9 5y ago
"You have to assume the authorities, and others are listening" doesnt this seem sort of outrageous to an outsider, since Google pioneered the practice of searching every user's emails? like, they dish it out but also hide their own ? Secondly the extreme and secretive legal agreement not to talk about your work, even years after leaving the company.. it seems Google got away with a lot, by virtue of "superpowers" that is objectionable for good reason, for the business community in general.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  It seems more like they applied to everyone the same standard that was applied to them.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    non-private email is a cynical mouse trap then, eating your customers privacy for your billions in ad profits.. how is that for "standard"?
Barrin92 5y ago
>You have to assume the authorities, and others, are listening. Given that Google is a publicly traded company and thus has to follow federal securities laws and keep much business communication on the books anyway I don't know why we're framing this as 'the government may be listening'.
wiz21c 5y ago
"don't write anything in an email you don't want to see in a NYT headline" If I got something like that, I sure want to tell the NYT...
- navbaker 5y ago
  But there is nothing suspicious or sensational about that advice! It's a short, concise way of warning employees of really any business that electronic communication never goes away and to be mindful of how they communicate.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Believe it or not, during my years at Google, I was never part of anything remotely illegal. I was part of a fair amount of silly jokes and occasional gossip that, out of context, could have looked pretty bad.
  - wiz21c 5y ago
    I don't have any doubt that none of what Google does is illegal. Same goes for 99% of the employers I had. But illegality is not the only reason things end up on NYT. For example, my former boss was clearly using his positions in various nationwide institutions to make sure things were discussed the way he wanted to. Depending on the institutions (for example being in an audit one as a "consultant" and another one being audited as a "chief-whatever-officer" is not illegal but it's downright suspicious) I never said anything about it but the newspapers caught up...

singron 5y ago

It makes sense to ask your lawyer legal questions, but I think this complaint is more about CCing lawyers on sensitive communications so you can write "Attorney Client Privileged" despite not actually wanting to discuss the matter with your attorneys. I'm almost surprised they didn't just put a lawyer on every mailing list and put the magic words in a mandatory footer.

efitz 5y ago
IANAL, but the trainings I took emphasized that regardless of the P&C label, it was NOT P&C if you weren't asking the lawyer a question, and any part of the discussion that happened before someone engaged counsel was not P&C. We also were instructed not to add people to such threads, but rather request that the lawyer do it.
- robrenaud 5y ago
  I am also not a lawyer, but I definitely saw a lot of a behavior where one would CC lawyer cat, and start the email with "please advise" on emails that contained sensitive information but no legal questions. It bothered me a little, but I also wanted to be able to discuss sensitive numbers in emails and also be productive, so I kinda ignored it.
aikinai 5y ago
No one does this and the training specifically says it won't work. You have to address the communication directly to the counsel with a specific question. And if there are too many people in the CC, that's also evidence that it wasn't really a question to counsel and it would be deprivileged.
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  That's exactly what the government is asking for. Per the article: >The government wants access to email chains where attorneys were copied, but never responded. so it sounds like an existing thread, where someone threw legal on the cc list after, and legal never felt it was appropriate to respond.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> All the large tech companies train their employees how to request advice from counsel and use privileged and confidential email communication What is described here is not training on “how to request advice from counsel and use privileged and confidential email communication”, it is direction to pretextually pantomime requesting advice of counsel for all discussion touching on certain topics in an effort to provide a pretextual fig leaf for deliberately withholding nonprivileged information expected to be relevant to future litigation with a premeditated false privilege claim.

berberous 5y ago

Did you read the linked government brief? I don’t trust the brief to not be misleading, but reading it at face value is pretty damning.

s17n 5y ago
The brief accurately describes Google training ("if you're discussing anything that might possibly be a sensitive issue, make sure to add an attorney to the thread and seek their advice"), as did the parent comment. I've never worked at any other big company but the whole thing did feel like a standard corporate practice. In the long run, companies are just going to get more and more aggressive with their retention policies, so all this will be irrelevant.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  “It’s not wrong if it’s standard practice” has become, dare I say it, the standard response to all sorts of misconduct in our industry. It should be obvious that standard and illegal practices are not mutually exclusive.

wdr1 5y ago

> MAGMA Out of curiosity, why do some people change "F" to "M" for Facebook to Meta, but leave the "G" there for Google?

analog31 5y ago
Because Google's name change happened long enough ago, that nobody remembers it.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Out of curiosity, why do some people change "F" to "M" for Facebook to Meta, but leave the "G" there for Google? Google is still a major tech company, though it is a subsidiary of Alphabet, while Facebook is now a product (not a subsidiary firm) of Meta, as I understand it.
paxys 5y ago
They are both very different kinds of restructures. Alphabet is a pure holding company. It doesn't have many employees directly working for it (other than top executives, some finance people and other minor overhead). And different Alphabet companies operate fully independently with next to zero sharing of employees, resources, money or tech. When people in these threads say Google, they specifically mean the company which makes up most of Alphabet and works on search, ads etc., not Calico or DeepMind. Meta on the other hand is a rebrand of Facebook (the company). There is no holding structure. If you were a Facebook employee, you now work for Meta. Employees at Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus, shared infra teams, and other minor projects all work for Meta as well. Facebook now refers to just the app, nothing else. The different brands are simply products that the company works on, not legal entities in themselves.
- toast0 5y ago
  > Meta on the other hand is a rebrand of Facebook (the company). There is no holding structure. If you were a Facebook employee, you now work for Meta. Employees at Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus, shared infra teams, and other minor projects all work for Meta as well. It doesn't make much difference to your line of reasoning, but at least WhatsApp operates as wholy owned subsidiaries, so there is some amount of holding company; note that the terms of service of Instagram are between users and Meta, but tos for WhatsApp is between users and WhatsApp LLC or WhatsApp Ireland Limited depending on the country code of the registered number. Note: I worked for WhatsApp until 2019; I don't know if WA Ireland is a subsidiary of WA LLC or Meta. There's some other overseas WhatsApp legal entities as well, although I don't have a list.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]