22 ms·

Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

563 points by integrale 4y ago

AlphaCharlie 4y ago
It's true, it was well known internally that internal chat that are sensitive would be auto deleted.
- jvolkman 4y ago
  Presumably if that hadn't been known, sensitive topics would've been discussed over Meet or in a physical room instead and the data still wouldn't be available to the DOJ.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-states-of-america-v-google-llc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-s... > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. This means that for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours. > All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had “put a legal hold in place” that “suspends auto-deletion.” zoinks
- crazysim 4y ago
  Turning off dogfood? https://workspace.google.com/products/vault/ https://workspace.google.com/products/vault/
  - meltyness 4y ago
    Google since 2012 still the kid playing soccer that's been told to run around and kick people in the shins except it's 18 now and it's not cute anymore, and now it's kicked a ref. They are dogfooding, which is why trying to adopt their products has been a case study in getting screwed. - GCal spam anyone, who hasn't been coming to unwanted meetings? - How about 4-5 redundant messaging services?
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It sounds like there were disagreements between Google's lawyers and the DOJ lawyers on the scope of the hold and what constitutes "reasonable."
  - burna_aws_acct 4y ago
    i.e., Google lawyers found a loophole, and through it all employee chats were funneled.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    Don't change the goalposts. It's not about collectively agreeing on what is reasonable. From the article: "Federal rules for litigation required Google to suspend deleting chats in mid-2019, when Google would have anticipated the antitrust lawsuit, the government said. But Google continued using “off the record chats” even after the lawsuit was filed, the DOJ’s attorneys wrote."
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    The consequences of being found to have destroyed evidence is one of the reasons why organizations generally treat litigation / potential litigation holds broadly. (Also, unless you know there is no possible way something could be beneficial, you never know what, touching on the broad issue of litigation, you might actually need yourself, e.g., to rebut an argument from the other side.)
    - Zircom 4y ago
      From what I'm seeing they're seeking monetary fines against Google for this, and at their scale that's hardly a deterrent. It always works out to be a fraction of what they'd actually have to pay if they hadn't pulled whatever bullshit got them fined, and in the end won't impact them or their bottom line in the slightest. Until the fines are high enough to actually deter them, or they start pressing criminal charges for shit like this, nothing gonna change with these huge megacorps.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  > That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. they cannot reasonably expect every day employees with no stakes or info into the confidential dealings would care about this. Al Alongside Google wouldn't care about them not caring.
  - FireBeyond 4y ago
    Very much so. Leaving aside some of the other points made on this, there's also a "eh, it's obviously not -that- important if it's not being enforced by policy/admin..."
  - ss108 4y ago
    It doesn't matter. "Every day employees" are not the ones who needed to do this.
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      They can be if the policy was that individual employees needed to self enforce retention on XYZ topics and employees were provided training to that effect. The Feds can not say a company must retain all records going forward, only that it make reasonable effort to retain relevant records and training employees to place items going forward in some sort of vault historically qualifies, especially when this training/retention has been vetted as being acceptable by corporate/insurance company legal teams. There is no mens rea element to having system constraints due to an existing IT infrastructure budget and the Feds don't get to just blow that budget up because 'they have concerns' or else they could use 'concerns' as a weapon to destroy companies.
      - donalhunt 4y ago
        Doesn't work like that. Done centrally. See https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7664657 https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7664657 The issue seems to be around use of "off the record" chat settings which are not covered by Vault (somewhat surprisingly for this audience; quite desirably for the target audience it would seem).
- Supermancho 4y ago
  > Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Google didn't do it, it was those other individuals who defied the court order. Uh huh.
  - etothepii 4y ago
    If true even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again. One assumes that if anyone had asked legal they would have been told they must switch off auto-delete. Lawyers aren't stupid they value their licence far more than their current job. I am highly doubtful there would be any written advice that said anything other than, if in doubt save.
    - fencepost 4y ago
      even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again. Eh, utterly impractical but I still think there should be a way to "jail" corporations. Easy - "Your offices are closed for the duration of the sentence. Your systems are shut down for the duration. Automatic payments set up in advance can continue as long as there are funds in your bank accounts, but your staff will not be monitoring them. You can appoint someone external to the organization to take care of some obligations." Survivable as a business for short enough sentences (effectively comparable to a devastating ransomware attack), but mighty painful and anyone involved will absolutely feel the wrath of ownership/shareholders.
      - humanizersequel 4y ago
        This would be disproportionately used as a tool against extremely small corporations without the budget to fight the "sentence" or weather out even a short shutdown.
      - coliveira 4y ago
        I believe the best penalty for a big company is really to be broken up. It doesn't penalize the people working on the company or its clients, since the business continue, but it does penalize the management and board of the company for their misbehavior.
- Name_Chawps 4y ago
  This is particularly funny because one way Google scams people to get them to buy more storage space is by moving deleted drive/Gmail items to the Drive Trash instead of deleting them. So when you try to clear space by deleting emails etc., it doesn't seem to help. Furthermore, even if you clear your Trash, it can take hours to take effect (for Some Reason), making it seem like you need to just give up and buy more storage. Apparently Google execs don't have the same problems deleting their own files.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Apples to oranges. (... and the reason Google does Drive Trash is that destroying user data is a much worse user experience than letting the delete be lazy, even when the user has given signal they want the data destroyed. There's decades of UX research to back that assertion; it's why "trash cans" were created in the first place as a UI abstraction. Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disrupt your career by deleting some critical info, that's on you. Outside Google, they try to provide a better experience for their users).
    - anticensor 4y ago
      > Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disrupt your career by deleting some critical info, that's on you. They should consistently apply the deletion policy, in fact, they should go even further and do what governments do to their own sensitive information: keep a deletion log that stores item IDs, authors and content types (but not the contents) that had been deleted along with the initiator and the date of deletion and the IP address of the machine that received the deletion. Something at Google's scale deserves ğovernment-level scrutiny.
      - sanderjd 4y ago
        Do you think users would want them to keep such a log?
  - briffle 4y ago
    My Gmail Trash folder auto deletes after 30 days. I have never made that as a change, its a default.
- vagabund 4y ago
  Somebody at Google made the conscious decision that enacting this intentionally defective policy -- in doing so, attempting to foist liability for data custody upon individual employees -- and fighting the inevitable objections to it was a preferable course of action to actually preventing their employees from discussing anything that might be used against them in the suit. It's clever, but it doesn't reflect fondly on Google's underlying antitrust behavior, and I'd be pissed as an employee.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    I don't think they were trying to shift liability, I think they were trying to make sure all the data was deleted, without themselves having to hit delete. It's their counsel's culpability that is being protected, i.e. the difference between being negligent or willful.
    - IncRnd 4y ago
      From the article, "The DOJ said in a court filing Thursday that Google trained employees on the benefits of using “off the record chats." They were trying to avoid liability not transfer it.
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        [dead]
    - gmd63 4y ago
      When are regulators and enforcers going to wise up to this "clever" game of disguising malicious behavior as negligence? I've seen so many people strategically play dumb that at this point I don't believe whether or not a violation was accidental should have any weight on the punishment. Nature doesn't care whether our immune systems accidentally slack off, or whether we accidentally didn't protect our cities from a flood. Why would we provide an incentive structure for people to act like they are stupid?
      - 4y ago
- sircastor 4y ago
  I user to work for an Automotive OEM, and I would get these emails with some frequency (sent to the whole company) that would instruct us to make sure we're not deleting or clearing materials related to some thing. I don't think the whole time I worked there any of it related to anything I was working on. We eventually had a training with counsel about keeping materials and why we didn't even want the appearance of anything suspicious.
- raincom 4y ago
  This is done with “off the record conversations” between senior execs and the legal counsel”. This is how big boys operate!
- irrational 4y ago
  Individual custodians just means employees, right? What incentive was there for employees to do this? I know that if I was told to do that, I would ignore it because I have better things to do than fiddle with settings. The only way I would do it is if they said I’d be fired if I didn’t do it or they increased my salary and decreased my other responsibilities.
  - Shakahs 4y ago
    I think "custodians" in this case means the administrators of the chat system. It was within their power to preserve this data, and they did not do so.
    - jml7c5 4y ago
      Though it says "chat-by-chat basis", which sounds like individual user action.
  - jonstewart 4y ago
    Yes, so when you get sent a “legal hold” notice, and you click on some kind of acceptance, you are basically acknowledging that you’ll get fired if you don’t preserve the data. That’s how this works. The incentive to compliance is that you don’t get fired by your general counsel.
    - irrational 4y ago
      I’m quite certain it will come out that nobody loses their jobs over this.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      If someone is fired, then Upper management just used rank and file employees as a shield to escape legal liability. But if no-one is fired, then what? Responsibility just disappears?
      - dwaite 4y ago
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  When you have a corporate slogan that says "Don't Be Evil" it means there's a big internal desire to start cackling alone at night in contemplation of your own evil (Frank Herbert quote, there). Looks like they lost that struggle against temptation.
- burna_aws_acct 4y ago
  QQ: Was Google the only corporation required to suspend its auto-delete practices? Thanks!
  - rawrawrawrr 4y ago
    No, some other big tech companies also had to do this.
- pverghese 4y ago
  > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. How the hell is this a thing. I can understand if they did this post litigation being filed then it would be a problem. How is a company supposed to anticipate when and where the government is going to file charges and keep records for them waiting. If the government was concerned they should have filed the lawsuit sooner not in 2020
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    It's very much a thing. The question is whether Google in preparation for an upcoming court action decided to start throwing records away. People don't get away with that before a divorce, before selling a company, or in any other situation.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
    In October 2019 the DoJ served Google with a Civil Investigative Demand asking for documents relating to its ad tech business and various other subjects. A month earlier, in September 2019, attorneys general for 49 states announced an investigation into Google's ad tech business, led by Texas AG Ken Paxton. Would it be reasonable for Google to have anticipated this litigation in 2019 after those events.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > How is a company supposed to anticipate when and where the government is going to file charges and keep records for them waiting. It is not just the government, evidence preservations rules attach for any relevant documents at the point where litigation is either initiated, or is, or reasonably should be, anticipated, regardless of whether the government is a party to the regulation. In the specific case of government action, knowledge of existence and subject matter of a government investigation generally provides a basis on which litigation on the subject should be reasonably anticipated (ditto with, e.g., an explicit threat of litigation by a private party. This is well-established law.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    If you and I have a private dispute, you sue, and I tell your lawyers I shredded everything related to the case because I routinely shred my papers at the end of each month, even if that's true, I'm probably going to settle for more than had I maintained records. (Assuming I wasn't blatantly lying.) The shred-it-all approach has its upsides. But it also comes with liability.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  Just for fun, below is taken verbatim from Google's Memo in Support of its Motion to Transfer Venue filed earlier this week in the latest antitrust case in the Eastern District of Virginia. After reading, take the quiz. Google's lawyers first began anticipating litigation in (a) 2020 (b) 2021 (c) 2022 (d) 2023 (e) none of the above. "In September 2019, the attorneys general of forty-eight States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico announced an investigation into Googles ad tech business, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.1 At the same time, the DOJ opened its own antitrust investigation into Googles ad tech business.2 In October 2019, the DOJ issued a Civil Investigative Demand to Google calling for production of documents relating to Googles ad tech business, along with a host of other topics. These two investigations of the same Google ad tech business proceeded in parallel. The DOJ and Texas both made expansive requests for production of documents concerning Googles ad tech." 1 See Harper Neidig, 50 attorneys general launch antitrust investigation into Google, The Hill (Sept. 9, 2019), https://thehill.com/policy/technology/460550-states-launch-antitrustinvestigation-into-google/. 2 Sara Forden & David McLaughlin, DOJ Scrutinizes Google Advertising, Search in Antitrust Probe, Bloomberg Law (Aug. 8, 2019), https://www.bloomberglaw.com/bloomberglawnews/antitrust/XF6V15CS000000. Source: https://ia601604.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.vaed.533508/gov.uscourts.vaed.533508.44.2.pdf https://ia601604.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.vaed.5...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rlewkov 4y ago
But, but, but .... don't be evil.
- Eumenes 4y ago
  But did you see the Year in Search video, it was so inspiring!
- klyrs 4y ago
  I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only evil to a capitalist is loss of capital. The "don't be evil" motto still applies. Just not the way that you're accustomed to reading it.
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    I'm surprised you're getting downvoted given the amount of snark in other comments. Or is the directness the part we're not supposed to be saying out loud?
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - uoaei 4y ago
        Economics isn't culture. "Culture war" isn't just "disagreements", it's disagreements about things that only exist in the realm of culture, e.g. saggy pants or watching people of the same gender kiss on TV. Economics, in fact, plays a central role here, given the profit motive that, to the bad actors, justifies these actions despite their illegality.
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        > A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices.[1] It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war It sounds like you are confusing culture with aesthetics.
paxys 4y ago
Terrible. Slaps on the wrist for everyone. Maybe a $5M fine to really teach them a lesson.
- f38zf5vdt 4y ago
  Spoliation is a crime https://lewisbrisbois.com/newsroom/legal-alerts/15-month-prison-sentence-reminds-that-spoliation-can-be-a-crime-resulting-i https://lewisbrisbois.com/newsroom/legal-alerts/15-month-pri...
  - masterof0 4y ago
    So do you think that Sundar will go to jail? please
- dd36 4y ago
  The judge will be really angry!
saagarjha 4y ago
I think we’re going to see another cycle in tech, much like the one where they realized that people kept saying illegal things in a documented fashion and this kept getting them into trouble leading to short retention policies. Except this time it will probably involve mandatory court-ordered retention which will further push people towards dropping “let’s discuss this offline” comments and trying to hide their conversations that way, which will probably also get regulated at some point. Company lawyers are always the “nanana I’m not touching you!” type where they just try to come up with some new cute way to skirt laws and it doesn’t actually work, but I guess they can keep doing illegal things for a few years until judges catch up when them.
- theptip 4y ago
  Not just tech; we're seeing this pressure in finance too. Matt Levine joked about this recently: > It really is wild that the SEC’s official position is now that it is illegal to “use unofficial communications to do things like cut deals, win clients or make trades.” “Conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels”! Imagine if that was really the rule! You can’t have lunch with a client and talk about business, or have beers with your colleagues and gripe about work, because that does not create a searchable archive for the SEC to review. > Of course the SEC does not entirely mean this. Yet. But in like five years, technology — and the SEC’s interpretation of the rules — will have advanced to the point that banks will get fined if their bankers talk about business with clients on the golf course. “You should have been wearing your bank-issued virtual reality headset and recorded the conversation,” the SEC will say, or I guess “you should have played golf in your bank’s official metaverse, which records all golf conversations for compliance review, rather than on a physical golf course.” The golf course is an unofficial channel! No business allowed!
  - voakbasda 4y ago
    I'd be completely in favor of this... if first the politicians, lawmakers, and bureaucrats were all held to the same standard.
    - 4y ago
jawadch93 4y ago
[dead]
choppaface 4y ago
And they also teach employees how to Communicate with Care: always CC a lawyer and ask a question. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/google-routinely-hides-emails-from-litigation-by-ccing-attorneys-doj-alleges/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/google-routinely... The issue here is not so much that Google is playing these games but how this draws energy away from OTHER games-- i.e. shipping and keeping alive new products and offering real customer service for existing ones.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  Wow, that's so completely fucked.
- jefftk 4y ago
  > always CC a lawyer and ask a question People would add lawyers like this, but (a) it wasn't something the trainings said to do, (b) the lawyers hated it, and (c) it doesn't work. (I used to work at Google, speaking only for myself)
  - omginternets 4y ago
    When does it not work, generally speaking?
    - jefftk 4y ago
      My understanding is that adding a lawyer to a conversation isn't sufficient to shield it from discovery. Instead you actually need to (a) be asking a lawyer for legal advice, (b) not cc or otherwise share with anyone who does not need that advice, and (c) not include unrelated matters. When I've written things that actually needed to be privileged I would start a separate email, address it only to the lawyer and specific people who also needed to know the advice, and keep the thread carefully on topic. (Not a lawyer)
    - justeleblanc 4y ago
      https://finance.yahoo.com/news/attorney-client-privilege-abuse-privilege-013142438.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/attorney-client-privilege-abu...
m3kw9 4y ago
It was a cron job your honour
- shaan7 4y ago
  lol I see what you did there xD
- eastbound 4y ago
  Soon: It was The AI. We can’t do anything, since we can’t predict how it behaves. Turns out this time it wanted to protect Google, but ya never know.
  - FridgeSeal 4y ago
    Suddenly the EU’s ruling about AI: “you’ve got to be able to describe how it behaves” becomes a lot more powerful.
    - supriyo-biswas 4y ago
      There will be a new AI winter due to such a ruling; not that I’m complaining about it though.
jefftk 4y ago
What's depressingly hilarious is that employees generally hated this behavior, because useful information would often disappear before you were done with it. For example, someone answers your question on Friday after you've left and when you check messages on Monday it's gone. Or you'd want to refer to something from a conversation a few days ago and it'd been deleted as well.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I don't have a horse in this race (anymore), but in the abstract I would love if government aligned incentives so that it was more painful for companies to toss records that should have been retained than to retain records that are damaging to them in hindsight, which they were legally allowed at some point to toss. For precisely the reason you indicated.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Then companies will just get rid of chat tools because informal discussions can be turned to fit any narrative. 'wow, Bob picked the worst possible way to solve xyz' negligence, knowingly having incompetent developers. You yourself said Bob's solutions were the worst possible. 'looking back, we should have implemented XYZ differently but we are stuck with that implementation now' can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court.
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      This site is crazy. I get downvoted for posting insurance company training regarding chat and get downvoted. I guess you all just run a company without worrying about having insurance? Are you people who downvoted in IT and the liaison with the insurance company?
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Companies can't get rid of chat tools anymore than previous bureaucracies could stop using paper. Operating at current scale requires digital communication. If they tried to cut that off, they'd discover that things stopped working. Twitter gave us an example of that just this week: https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musks-twitter https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musk...
LatteLazy 4y ago
Why would good in mid 2019 know it had to save chat data for use in a lawsuit not filed for over another year? And why would such a lawsuit require saving all chats between everyone? Should google also have started video recording all in person meetings or stopped throwing out any trash in case there was something in those bins too?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  > Google’s duty to preserve documents began when it reasonably anticipated litigation. According to the company’s privilege logs, beginning as early as May 2019, Google began withholding materials “compiled in connection with ongoing DOJ investigation.” The United States then issued its first Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to Google on August 30, 2019, and issued two subsequent CIDs in October 2019. If I'm reading this right- they allege that Google knew because they had already began withholding some materials and were issued 3 CIDs.
jonas21 4y ago
Is the DoJ's argument that if you anticipate being sued in the future, you're not allowed to use private messaging at all?
- tantalor 4y ago
  I think the argument is, if you are on a lit hold and preserving some of your written communications, then you have to preserve all of them. You can't decide to shield some of them. That makes sense, I guess, but why would that not apply to verbal communications as well?
  - cma 4y ago
    > why would that not apply to verbal communications as well? Corporate body cams. They wanted it first for fast food register workers but maybe it comes to white collar jobs first (aside from police). It is already sort of there with work from home surveillance-ware.
    - tantalor 4y ago
      For that matter, the assistants built into phones and smart home devices are always listening for their wake word, I assume they have a little buffer of recorded sound which they are constantly erasing. Is that spoliation?
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > why would that not apply to verbal communications as well Because total surveillance has never been goal or precedent. The legal profession has always understood that people act differently when they speak and when they write. It is unrealistic to hold people accountable to every mis-spoken word, mistake or dumb thing they have said in spur of the moment. If I ask someone 'how long will X take' and they must answer on the spot, I do not expect an accurate answer. When you are writing, you have a chance to think through what you are saying. You should also be aware that these words could be read in 1 hour or in 1 day, and they still need to be understood correctly. You could be help accountable for the promises, whether legally, or informally by friends and family. That's why the law recognizes the superiority of written versus verbal agreements.
megous 4y ago
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." ~Eric Schmidt lol
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  He catches a lot of shit for his phrasing, but Schmidt had a habit of saying true things in a way that maximized the odds they'd be received poorly. (In context, they were talking about the long-retention and implicit-digital-footprint effects on online services, and he was noting that the trends were only going to become "more observation" and "more retention" over time... At some point, it becomes much cheaper to just not do the thing online if you want to preserve your privacy ... and in general, he was right. It's not just government observation; it's corporate observation and private observation, and the ability to churn through someone's entire Twitter history, etc., etc.).
  - deelowe 4y ago
    A bit of a shitty answer though when the context surrounding the discussion was about whether Google was doing anything to protect privacy. Apple, by comparison, seems to have navigated the same environment extremely well. They of course can't prevent certain things from happening, but for what's within their control, they are doing what they can.
  - donalhunt 4y ago
    As someone who heard this first hand (probably at an all-hands or TGIF), the quote from the earlier post was very much not "don't use communication channels that leave a trail" and much more "don't do illegal shit". In addition, I fondly remember him quibbing that there is no internet in jail. :/ Saying that, I'll leave you in the knowledge that Google Meet is excellent for off the record conversations (and executives are great for ignoring rules set for the rest of the company).
  - wmeredith 4y ago
    Schmidt doesn't get shit for saying true things. He gets shit for being a rich hypocritical asshole. At the time he was spouting his holier-than-thou bullshit, he was colluding with other high-tech firms (Apple, et al.) to suppress workers' salaries, and he was actively hiding the evidence of doing so. It came out in court anyway and Google was part of a half-billion dollar settlement over the matter. Eric Schmidt is not some misunderstood truth-sayer. He's a crook and a hypocrite and the things he says are received poorly because he's an elitist who's made his $25,000,000,000 fortune punching down.
mitchellst 4y ago
I'll add a recent misfortune for a peer company: https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/judge-sanctions-facebook-and-biglaw-firm-925k-for-delay-misdirection-and-frivolous-arguments https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/judge-sanctions-faceb... Looks like the real powers in the US are losing patience with some of the low-level legal tomfoolery of big tech. About time. Nothing against the companies, but make your money by making products people love, not by playing footsie with the court system.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Google thinks they are above the law and bigger and more powerful than the US government. It will be interesting to see if the courts throw the book at Google for directly disobeying them and assert themselves as having control or if they'll roll over and confirm Google as our unelected King.
1letterunixname 4y ago
Want to wipe your work computer and put a new version of Linux on it? First, check your legal hold status. Want to delete any kind of employee data? First, filter out users by legal hold status.
- briffle 4y ago
  I get the point you are trying to make, but usually the holding is on the servers. Most mail and communications servers allow for this.. (ie, don't actually delete any emails that mention the company ACME because of a legal hold number 123434). And I (A sysadmin) have literally been tasked with overnighting employee laptops to foresnic groups, and issuing them a brand new one. (typically, they just image the drives, and send them back, we would wipe the system, and put it back in our 'spare pool'.)
  - kridsdale1 4y ago
    Before I quit Meta, we were actually told we had to do this. We could not delete files from SOURCE CODE anymore.
    - 1letterunixname 4y ago
      Which role / pillar organization?
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    Unfortunately, your experience differs in ways that don't apply categorically to the points I made from my perspective and experience. We have hooks into the fleet of endpoints (corporate with some 10k BYODs), servers, and various vendor apps. This is realized by data legal provides reduced to a boolean per user because there's no need to convey excess detail. When an employee visits Help Desk, they are limited by the possible actions HD can take if they are under a legal hold. The same applies to certain OS upgrades, whether HD or DIY. It would be impossible to manage VDI or "throwaway" servers at scale without a centralized legal hold inquiry API. Google has (or had) a far greater corporate tech staff / employee ratio in the industry than similar companies, so there's no excuse for them not to have a comprehensive legal hold program throughout their technical organization.
kevmo 4y ago
Nothing is going to happen until we start imprisoning executives for this sort of flagrant illegal behavior. Fines and settlements mean nothing. People like Sundar Pichai, Eric Schmidt, etc need to be labeled as anti-social criminals & face the justice system.
nosefrog 4y ago
> The government said the company only committed this week to permanently preserve its employees’ chat messages—after DOJ officials informed Google they would file their motion for sanctions. As a current Google employee, I'm very happy about this change.
wunderland 4y ago
This was a shrewd move on Google's part because certainly the cost of destroying evidence will be significantly lower than any smoking gun that might have been said over chat.
bloomingeek 4y ago
I'm not worried,Google will default to their motto, "Do more evil." Wait, is that right?
- qbrass 4y ago
  The motto was "Don't be evil." It said nothing about how much evil you were allowed to do.
krmbzds 4y ago
https://archive.is/7SiNn https://archive.is/7SiNn
avalys 4y ago
This is regulatory and legal overreach. Yes, there are laws about preserving evidence and records. However, these laws haven't been updated to reflect how office communication has changed over the years. No one would propose, circa 1950, that companies must record every conversation between two people in the office for regulatory compliance or lawsuit discovery, etc. purposes. But effectively, that's what retention requirements for chat messages amount to. What is the principled policy argument (ignoring practicality) for requiring retention of chat messages, but not requiring every employee to wear a body camera that permanently records every work-related interaction they have IRL?
- water-your-self 4y ago
  This isnt equivalent to wearing a body camera. Maybe a screen recorder would warrant that comparison. Direct messages are a form of written communication
  - avalys 4y ago
    The point is that we use written communication a lot more in a modern (especially remote) office than we did in 1950, and for a much broader range of purposes and interactions than when the regulations requiring records retention were written.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > This isnt equivalent to wearing a body camera. Rather, the requirement is not equivalent to a requirement to wear a body camera, but instead to a requirement that if you wear and have actively recording a body camera, you can’t destroy the recording if it is relevant to a subject of reasonably anticipated, or actually in progress, litigation.
- cldellow 4y ago
  Making everyone wear body cams: they weren't previously using body cams, you have to spend $ to buy them, the cams will capture me while using the washroom. Stopping the deletion of chats: an IT person has to toggle a setting. It feels pretty different to me! To roll with your 1950s analogy, it feels a lot more like the office secretaries being told that instead of shredding inter-office memos, they have to hold on to them. I realize you said ignoring practicality...but that seems like a weird constraint to add. Bureaucracies run through paperwork, so capturing emails and DMs are often sufficient, while being much less invasive and cheaper.
coliveira 4y ago
I think it is completely absurd that the government let companies get away with the policy of deleting messages. Any public and/or large enough company should be required to keep all communications, internal and external, for at least a decade. These companies are required to respond to the public. In todays world the only reason for them not to keep records is to evade responsibility for whatever they're doing wrong.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Funny how Google can ignore the privacy of internet users' conversations but when it comes to their employees' conversations, Google does not want to share those with the Government. According to the Government's memo supporting sanctions, Google is deleting conversations within 24h despite being under litigation holds. https://ia902501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.512.1.pdf https://ia902501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appearing on CNBC once said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." If Google is not doing anything wrong, then why not give the Government what it is are asking for and let justice prevail. Google collects and surveils internet users' conversations on a mass scale without a subpoena, for whatever purpose(s) it chooses, for profit. To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare, that's apparently acceptable. However when the Government subpoenas Google for Google's conversations, for the sole purpose of determining whether Google is complying with the law, Google resists. Personal data mining on billions of people. No problem. Monitoring employees to catch leakers and whistleblowers. Can do. Saving employee chats to satisty document requests from the Government. Too time-consuming and burdensome! There is perhaps no company in the world better equipped to comb through peoples' conversations.
- bredren 4y ago
  In Schmidt’s first tv interview on Bitcoin he also said concern over unchecked criminality was overblown. He suggested that criminals make enough opsec mistakes that would be recorded that the government need not be worried.
  - HealthNeed 4y ago
    Which has mostly been born out, at least about criminals making opsec mistakes.
- wmeredith 4y ago
  "Rules for thee, but not for me" may actually be the oldest trick in the book. Google's hypocrisy here is disappointing, but not surprising in the least.
iepathos 4y ago
lol this checks out, but justice department cannot assert that companies are suppose to keep all internet conversations indefinitely. No precedence for that so they are just blowing smoke here huffing and puffing because they have zero evidence and that must be the defendant's fault.
cobaltoxide 4y ago
As an ex-Googler ... That auto-delete policy was extremely annoying. And even if we turned it off, it only changed from a 24 hour deletion to something like 30 days. The chats certainly wouldn't be kept permanently. Corporate data "retention" policies are entirely intended to avoid future legal "discovery." My understanding is that policies like Google's are considered "best practices". For example, my current employer deletes Slack messages after 90 days for the same reason. It is also extremely annoying. My current employer even deletes Google Docs after something like 180 days unless they are put into special folders.
bmitc 4y ago
Send people to prison and/or fine the hell out of these corporations.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Putting CEOs in prison is the only way to fix gross corporate misconduct. This is why we'll never do it.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  [dead]
wang_li 4y ago
The fine needs to be large enough to wipe out all of Alphabet's profit for the period in question.
user3939382 4y ago
That’s fine. Judges in this case are instructed or instruct juries to, assume the missing evidence is maximally damaging for the defendant.
mcqueenjordan 4y ago
I really despise auto-delete policies. Obviously, because of the inconvenience and all the context/history/search capability you lose, but also because it's addressing the problem the wrong way. Rather than be accountable for your actions, the company would rather create a system to circumvent the law and sweep the evidence under the rug. Creates a terrible incentive structure. It goes to show that the company is run by lawyers. Bezos had a great bit he would always say at all hands about this kind of stuff: "Look, we are a large corporation. We deserve to be inspected. It’s going to happen. Don’t take it personally. Because when you take it personally, you start to do things that are counterproductive.” "There’s only one way to handle it, and that is that we have to conduct ourselves in such a way that when we are scrutinized, we pass with flying colors.”
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ftc-prepares-possible-antitrust-suit-against-amazon-11675438256 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ftc-prepares-possible-antit...
  - mcqueenjordan 4y ago
    That’s all well and good. I still think the quote stands on its own as a great philosophy for how to approach scrutiny as a large business. Philosophy and execution are separate!
hedora 4y ago
What’s the penalty for this? The article says “sanction”, but that probably doesn’t mean “bar domestic companies and the US government from doing business with them”. Presumably, the punishment has to be worse than what would happen if the documents proved all of the DOJ’s allegations, or there would be no incentive to obey subpoenas. (Note that, while unrealistically harsh, such a policy is probably still too lax: Deleting the documents might be the best course of action, assuming they contain shady shit the DOJ hadn’t thought of. Personal jail time for everyone above the responsible party in the org chart might make sense, especially if it included the board of directors.)
rkagerer 4y ago
The way I feel about people who choose to work at Meta is how I'm beginning to feel about those coming onboard lately with Google. Strikes me as nothing like the rosy-principled place it set out to be in the 'do no evil' days.
blindriver 4y ago
Why on earth would anyone from Google want to break the law and try to destroy evidence on behalf of Google? I highly doubt this happened the way that this article claims it happened. Google has hundreds of thousands of employees, the idea that there's a group of employees that are willing to go to jail on behalf of the company over something that is easily detected is ridiculous.
itsathrower 4y ago
"Do as I say, not as I do" said the federal government...which just updated its polices January 5 2023 to say that yes, chat messages are records too. https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/bulletins/2023/2023-02 https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/bulletins/2023/2023-02
PicassoCTs 4y ago
Forgive my query, but why is destroying evidence not seeing as admitting guilt?

563 points by integrale 4y ago

AlphaCharlie 4y ago

It's true, it was well known internally that internal chat that are sensitive would be auto deleted.

jvolkman 4y ago
Presumably if that hadn't been known, sensitive topics would've been discussed over Meet or in a physical room instead and the data still wouldn't be available to the DOJ.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-states-of-america-v-google-llc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-s... > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. This means that for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours. > All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had “put a legal hold in place” that “suspends auto-deletion.” zoinks

crazysim 4y ago
Turning off dogfood? https://workspace.google.com/products/vault/ https://workspace.google.com/products/vault/
- meltyness 4y ago
  Google since 2012 still the kid playing soccer that's been told to run around and kick people in the shins except it's 18 now and it's not cute anymore, and now it's kicked a ref. They are dogfooding, which is why trying to adopt their products has been a case study in getting screwed. - GCal spam anyone, who hasn't been coming to unwanted meetings? - How about 4-5 redundant messaging services?
shadowgovt 4y ago
It sounds like there were disagreements between Google's lawyers and the DOJ lawyers on the scope of the hold and what constitutes "reasonable."
- burna_aws_acct 4y ago
  i.e., Google lawyers found a loophole, and through it all employee chats were funneled.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- IncRnd 4y ago
  Don't change the goalposts. It's not about collectively agreeing on what is reasonable. From the article: "Federal rules for litigation required Google to suspend deleting chats in mid-2019, when Google would have anticipated the antitrust lawsuit, the government said. But Google continued using “off the record chats” even after the lawsuit was filed, the DOJ’s attorneys wrote."
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  The consequences of being found to have destroyed evidence is one of the reasons why organizations generally treat litigation / potential litigation holds broadly. (Also, unless you know there is no possible way something could be beneficial, you never know what, touching on the broad issue of litigation, you might actually need yourself, e.g., to rebut an argument from the other side.)
  - Zircom 4y ago
    From what I'm seeing they're seeking monetary fines against Google for this, and at their scale that's hardly a deterrent. It always works out to be a fraction of what they'd actually have to pay if they hadn't pulled whatever bullshit got them fined, and in the end won't impact them or their bottom line in the slightest. Until the fines are high enough to actually deter them, or they start pressing criminal charges for shit like this, nothing gonna change with these huge megacorps.
hackernewds 4y ago
> That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. they cannot reasonably expect every day employees with no stakes or info into the confidential dealings would care about this. Al Alongside Google wouldn't care about them not caring.
- FireBeyond 4y ago
  Very much so. Leaving aside some of the other points made on this, there's also a "eh, it's obviously not -that- important if it's not being enforced by policy/admin..."
- ss108 4y ago
  It doesn't matter. "Every day employees" are not the ones who needed to do this.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    They can be if the policy was that individual employees needed to self enforce retention on XYZ topics and employees were provided training to that effect. The Feds can not say a company must retain all records going forward, only that it make reasonable effort to retain relevant records and training employees to place items going forward in some sort of vault historically qualifies, especially when this training/retention has been vetted as being acceptable by corporate/insurance company legal teams. There is no mens rea element to having system constraints due to an existing IT infrastructure budget and the Feds don't get to just blow that budget up because 'they have concerns' or else they could use 'concerns' as a weapon to destroy companies.
    - donalhunt 4y ago
      Doesn't work like that. Done centrally. See https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7664657 https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7664657 The issue seems to be around use of "off the record" chat settings which are not covered by Vault (somewhat surprisingly for this audience; quite desirably for the target audience it would seem).
Supermancho 4y ago
> Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Google didn't do it, it was those other individuals who defied the court order. Uh huh.
- etothepii 4y ago
  If true even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again. One assumes that if anyone had asked legal they would have been told they must switch off auto-delete. Lawyers aren't stupid they value their licence far more than their current job. I am highly doubtful there would be any written advice that said anything other than, if in doubt save.
  - fencepost 4y ago
    even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again. Eh, utterly impractical but I still think there should be a way to "jail" corporations. Easy - "Your offices are closed for the duration of the sentence. Your systems are shut down for the duration. Automatic payments set up in advance can continue as long as there are funds in your bank accounts, but your staff will not be monitoring them. You can appoint someone external to the organization to take care of some obligations." Survivable as a business for short enough sentences (effectively comparable to a devastating ransomware attack), but mighty painful and anyone involved will absolutely feel the wrath of ownership/shareholders.
    - humanizersequel 4y ago
      This would be disproportionately used as a tool against extremely small corporations without the budget to fight the "sentence" or weather out even a short shutdown.
    - coliveira 4y ago
      I believe the best penalty for a big company is really to be broken up. It doesn't penalize the people working on the company or its clients, since the business continue, but it does penalize the management and board of the company for their misbehavior.
Name_Chawps 4y ago
This is particularly funny because one way Google scams people to get them to buy more storage space is by moving deleted drive/Gmail items to the Drive Trash instead of deleting them. So when you try to clear space by deleting emails etc., it doesn't seem to help. Furthermore, even if you clear your Trash, it can take hours to take effect (for Some Reason), making it seem like you need to just give up and buy more storage. Apparently Google execs don't have the same problems deleting their own files.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Apples to oranges. (... and the reason Google does Drive Trash is that destroying user data is a much worse user experience than letting the delete be lazy, even when the user has given signal they want the data destroyed. There's decades of UX research to back that assertion; it's why "trash cans" were created in the first place as a UI abstraction. Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disrupt your career by deleting some critical info, that's on you. Outside Google, they try to provide a better experience for their users).
  - anticensor 4y ago
    > Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disrupt your career by deleting some critical info, that's on you. They should consistently apply the deletion policy, in fact, they should go even further and do what governments do to their own sensitive information: keep a deletion log that stores item IDs, authors and content types (but not the contents) that had been deleted along with the initiator and the date of deletion and the IP address of the machine that received the deletion. Something at Google's scale deserves ğovernment-level scrutiny.
    - sanderjd 4y ago
      Do you think users would want them to keep such a log?
- briffle 4y ago
  My Gmail Trash folder auto deletes after 30 days. I have never made that as a change, its a default.
vagabund 4y ago
Somebody at Google made the conscious decision that enacting this intentionally defective policy -- in doing so, attempting to foist liability for data custody upon individual employees -- and fighting the inevitable objections to it was a preferable course of action to actually preventing their employees from discussing anything that might be used against them in the suit. It's clever, but it doesn't reflect fondly on Google's underlying antitrust behavior, and I'd be pissed as an employee.
- freejazz 4y ago
  I don't think they were trying to shift liability, I think they were trying to make sure all the data was deleted, without themselves having to hit delete. It's their counsel's culpability that is being protected, i.e. the difference between being negligent or willful.
  - IncRnd 4y ago
    From the article, "The DOJ said in a court filing Thursday that Google trained employees on the benefits of using “off the record chats." They were trying to avoid liability not transfer it.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      [dead]
  - gmd63 4y ago
    When are regulators and enforcers going to wise up to this "clever" game of disguising malicious behavior as negligence? I've seen so many people strategically play dumb that at this point I don't believe whether or not a violation was accidental should have any weight on the punishment. Nature doesn't care whether our immune systems accidentally slack off, or whether we accidentally didn't protect our cities from a flood. Why would we provide an incentive structure for people to act like they are stupid?
    - 4y ago
sircastor 4y ago
I user to work for an Automotive OEM, and I would get these emails with some frequency (sent to the whole company) that would instruct us to make sure we're not deleting or clearing materials related to some thing. I don't think the whole time I worked there any of it related to anything I was working on. We eventually had a training with counsel about keeping materials and why we didn't even want the appearance of anything suspicious.
raincom 4y ago
This is done with “off the record conversations” between senior execs and the legal counsel”. This is how big boys operate!
irrational 4y ago
Individual custodians just means employees, right? What incentive was there for employees to do this? I know that if I was told to do that, I would ignore it because I have better things to do than fiddle with settings. The only way I would do it is if they said I’d be fired if I didn’t do it or they increased my salary and decreased my other responsibilities.
- Shakahs 4y ago
  I think "custodians" in this case means the administrators of the chat system. It was within their power to preserve this data, and they did not do so.
  - jml7c5 4y ago
    Though it says "chat-by-chat basis", which sounds like individual user action.
- jonstewart 4y ago
  Yes, so when you get sent a “legal hold” notice, and you click on some kind of acceptance, you are basically acknowledging that you’ll get fired if you don’t preserve the data. That’s how this works. The incentive to compliance is that you don’t get fired by your general counsel.
  - irrational 4y ago
    I’m quite certain it will come out that nobody loses their jobs over this.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    If someone is fired, then Upper management just used rank and file employees as a shield to escape legal liability. But if no-one is fired, then what? Responsibility just disappears?
    - dwaite 4y ago
photochemsyn 4y ago
When you have a corporate slogan that says "Don't Be Evil" it means there's a big internal desire to start cackling alone at night in contemplation of your own evil (Frank Herbert quote, there). Looks like they lost that struggle against temptation.
burna_aws_acct 4y ago
QQ: Was Google the only corporation required to suspend its auto-delete practices? Thanks!
- rawrawrawrr 4y ago
  No, some other big tech companies also had to do this.
pverghese 4y ago
> The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. How the hell is this a thing. I can understand if they did this post litigation being filed then it would be a problem. How is a company supposed to anticipate when and where the government is going to file charges and keep records for them waiting. If the government was concerned they should have filed the lawsuit sooner not in 2020
- IncRnd 4y ago
  It's very much a thing. The question is whether Google in preparation for an upcoming court action decided to start throwing records away. People don't get away with that before a divorce, before selling a company, or in any other situation.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
  In October 2019 the DoJ served Google with a Civil Investigative Demand asking for documents relating to its ad tech business and various other subjects. A month earlier, in September 2019, attorneys general for 49 states announced an investigation into Google's ad tech business, led by Texas AG Ken Paxton. Would it be reasonable for Google to have anticipated this litigation in 2019 after those events.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > How is a company supposed to anticipate when and where the government is going to file charges and keep records for them waiting. It is not just the government, evidence preservations rules attach for any relevant documents at the point where litigation is either initiated, or is, or reasonably should be, anticipated, regardless of whether the government is a party to the regulation. In the specific case of government action, knowledge of existence and subject matter of a government investigation generally provides a basis on which litigation on the subject should be reasonably anticipated (ditto with, e.g., an explicit threat of litigation by a private party. This is well-established law.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  If you and I have a private dispute, you sue, and I tell your lawyers I shredded everything related to the case because I routinely shred my papers at the end of each month, even if that's true, I'm probably going to settle for more than had I maintained records. (Assuming I wasn't blatantly lying.) The shred-it-all approach has its upsides. But it also comes with liability.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Just for fun, below is taken verbatim from Google's Memo in Support of its Motion to Transfer Venue filed earlier this week in the latest antitrust case in the Eastern District of Virginia. After reading, take the quiz. Google's lawyers first began anticipating litigation in (a) 2020 (b) 2021 (c) 2022 (d) 2023 (e) none of the above. "In September 2019, the attorneys general of forty-eight States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico announced an investigation into Googles ad tech business, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.1 At the same time, the DOJ opened its own antitrust investigation into Googles ad tech business.2 In October 2019, the DOJ issued a Civil Investigative Demand to Google calling for production of documents relating to Googles ad tech business, along with a host of other topics. These two investigations of the same Google ad tech business proceeded in parallel. The DOJ and Texas both made expansive requests for production of documents concerning Googles ad tech." 1 See Harper Neidig, 50 attorneys general launch antitrust investigation into Google, The Hill (Sept. 9, 2019), https://thehill.com/policy/technology/460550-states-launch-antitrustinvestigation-into-google/. 2 Sara Forden & David McLaughlin, DOJ Scrutinizes Google Advertising, Search in Antitrust Probe, Bloomberg Law (Aug. 8, 2019), https://www.bloomberglaw.com/bloomberglawnews/antitrust/XF6V15CS000000. Source: https://ia601604.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.vaed.533508/gov.uscourts.vaed.533508.44.2.pdf https://ia601604.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.vaed.5...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rlewkov 4y ago

But, but, but .... don't be evil.

Eumenes 4y ago
But did you see the Year in Search video, it was so inspiring!
klyrs 4y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only evil to a capitalist is loss of capital. The "don't be evil" motto still applies. Just not the way that you're accustomed to reading it.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  I'm surprised you're getting downvoted given the amount of snark in other comments. Or is the directness the part we're not supposed to be saying out loud?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - uoaei 4y ago
      Economics isn't culture. "Culture war" isn't just "disagreements", it's disagreements about things that only exist in the realm of culture, e.g. saggy pants or watching people of the same gender kiss on TV. Economics, in fact, plays a central role here, given the profit motive that, to the bad actors, justifies these actions despite their illegality.
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        > A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices.[1] It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war It sounds like you are confusing culture with aesthetics.

paxys 4y ago

Terrible. Slaps on the wrist for everyone. Maybe a $5M fine to really teach them a lesson.

f38zf5vdt 4y ago
Spoliation is a crime https://lewisbrisbois.com/newsroom/legal-alerts/15-month-prison-sentence-reminds-that-spoliation-can-be-a-crime-resulting-i https://lewisbrisbois.com/newsroom/legal-alerts/15-month-pri...
- masterof0 4y ago
  So do you think that Sundar will go to jail? please
dd36 4y ago
The judge will be really angry!

saagarjha 4y ago

I think we’re going to see another cycle in tech, much like the one where they realized that people kept saying illegal things in a documented fashion and this kept getting them into trouble leading to short retention policies. Except this time it will probably involve mandatory court-ordered retention which will further push people towards dropping “let’s discuss this offline” comments and trying to hide their conversations that way, which will probably also get regulated at some point. Company lawyers are always the “nanana I’m not touching you!” type where they just try to come up with some new cute way to skirt laws and it doesn’t actually work, but I guess they can keep doing illegal things for a few years until judges catch up when them.

theptip 4y ago
Not just tech; we're seeing this pressure in finance too. Matt Levine joked about this recently: > It really is wild that the SEC’s official position is now that it is illegal to “use unofficial communications to do things like cut deals, win clients or make trades.” “Conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels”! Imagine if that was really the rule! You can’t have lunch with a client and talk about business, or have beers with your colleagues and gripe about work, because that does not create a searchable archive for the SEC to review. > Of course the SEC does not entirely mean this. Yet. But in like five years, technology — and the SEC’s interpretation of the rules — will have advanced to the point that banks will get fined if their bankers talk about business with clients on the golf course. “You should have been wearing your bank-issued virtual reality headset and recorded the conversation,” the SEC will say, or I guess “you should have played golf in your bank’s official metaverse, which records all golf conversations for compliance review, rather than on a physical golf course.” The golf course is an unofficial channel! No business allowed!
- voakbasda 4y ago
  I'd be completely in favor of this... if first the politicians, lawmakers, and bureaucrats were all held to the same standard.
  - 4y ago

jawadch93 4y ago

[dead]

choppaface 4y ago

And they also teach employees how to Communicate with Care: always CC a lawyer and ask a question. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/google-routinely-hides-emails-from-litigation-by-ccing-attorneys-doj-alleges/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/google-routinely... The issue here is not so much that Google is playing these games but how this draws energy away from OTHER games-- i.e. shipping and keeping alive new products and offering real customer service for existing ones.

p0pcult 4y ago
Wow, that's so completely fucked.
jefftk 4y ago
> always CC a lawyer and ask a question People would add lawyers like this, but (a) it wasn't something the trainings said to do, (b) the lawyers hated it, and (c) it doesn't work. (I used to work at Google, speaking only for myself)
- omginternets 4y ago
  When does it not work, generally speaking?
  - jefftk 4y ago
    My understanding is that adding a lawyer to a conversation isn't sufficient to shield it from discovery. Instead you actually need to (a) be asking a lawyer for legal advice, (b) not cc or otherwise share with anyone who does not need that advice, and (c) not include unrelated matters. When I've written things that actually needed to be privileged I would start a separate email, address it only to the lawyer and specific people who also needed to know the advice, and keep the thread carefully on topic. (Not a lawyer)
  - justeleblanc 4y ago
    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/attorney-client-privilege-abuse-privilege-013142438.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/attorney-client-privilege-abu...

m3kw9 4y ago

It was a cron job your honour

shaan7 4y ago
lol I see what you did there xD
eastbound 4y ago
Soon: It was The AI. We can’t do anything, since we can’t predict how it behaves. Turns out this time it wanted to protect Google, but ya never know.
- FridgeSeal 4y ago
  Suddenly the EU’s ruling about AI: “you’ve got to be able to describe how it behaves” becomes a lot more powerful.
  - supriyo-biswas 4y ago
    There will be a new AI winter due to such a ruling; not that I’m complaining about it though.

jefftk 4y ago

What's depressingly hilarious is that employees generally hated this behavior, because useful information would often disappear before you were done with it. For example, someone answers your question on Friday after you've left and when you check messages on Monday it's gone. Or you'd want to refer to something from a conversation a few days ago and it'd been deleted as well.

shadowgovt 4y ago
I don't have a horse in this race (anymore), but in the abstract I would love if government aligned incentives so that it was more painful for companies to toss records that should have been retained than to retain records that are damaging to them in hindsight, which they were legally allowed at some point to toss. For precisely the reason you indicated.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Then companies will just get rid of chat tools because informal discussions can be turned to fit any narrative. 'wow, Bob picked the worst possible way to solve xyz' negligence, knowingly having incompetent developers. You yourself said Bob's solutions were the worst possible. 'looking back, we should have implemented XYZ differently but we are stuck with that implementation now' can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    This site is crazy. I get downvoted for posting insurance company training regarding chat and get downvoted. I guess you all just run a company without worrying about having insurance? Are you people who downvoted in IT and the liaison with the insurance company?
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Companies can't get rid of chat tools anymore than previous bureaucracies could stop using paper. Operating at current scale requires digital communication. If they tried to cut that off, they'd discover that things stopped working. Twitter gave us an example of that just this week: https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musks-twitter https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musk...

LatteLazy 4y ago

Why would good in mid 2019 know it had to save chat data for use in a lawsuit not filed for over another year? And why would such a lawsuit require saving all chats between everyone? Should google also have started video recording all in person meetings or stopped throwing out any trash in case there was something in those bins too?

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> Google’s duty to preserve documents began when it reasonably anticipated litigation. According to the company’s privilege logs, beginning as early as May 2019, Google began withholding materials “compiled in connection with ongoing DOJ investigation.” The United States then issued its first Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to Google on August 30, 2019, and issued two subsequent CIDs in October 2019. If I'm reading this right- they allege that Google knew because they had already began withholding some materials and were issued 3 CIDs.

jonas21 4y ago

Is the DoJ's argument that if you anticipate being sued in the future, you're not allowed to use private messaging at all?

tantalor 4y ago
I think the argument is, if you are on a lit hold and preserving some of your written communications, then you have to preserve all of them. You can't decide to shield some of them. That makes sense, I guess, but why would that not apply to verbal communications as well?
- cma 4y ago
  > why would that not apply to verbal communications as well? Corporate body cams. They wanted it first for fast food register workers but maybe it comes to white collar jobs first (aside from police). It is already sort of there with work from home surveillance-ware.
  - tantalor 4y ago
    For that matter, the assistants built into phones and smart home devices are always listening for their wake word, I assume they have a little buffer of recorded sound which they are constantly erasing. Is that spoliation?
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > why would that not apply to verbal communications as well Because total surveillance has never been goal or precedent. The legal profession has always understood that people act differently when they speak and when they write. It is unrealistic to hold people accountable to every mis-spoken word, mistake or dumb thing they have said in spur of the moment. If I ask someone 'how long will X take' and they must answer on the spot, I do not expect an accurate answer. When you are writing, you have a chance to think through what you are saying. You should also be aware that these words could be read in 1 hour or in 1 day, and they still need to be understood correctly. You could be help accountable for the promises, whether legally, or informally by friends and family. That's why the law recognizes the superiority of written versus verbal agreements.

megous 4y ago

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." ~Eric Schmidt lol

shadowgovt 4y ago
He catches a lot of shit for his phrasing, but Schmidt had a habit of saying true things in a way that maximized the odds they'd be received poorly. (In context, they were talking about the long-retention and implicit-digital-footprint effects on online services, and he was noting that the trends were only going to become "more observation" and "more retention" over time... At some point, it becomes much cheaper to just not do the thing online if you want to preserve your privacy ... and in general, he was right. It's not just government observation; it's corporate observation and private observation, and the ability to churn through someone's entire Twitter history, etc., etc.).
- deelowe 4y ago
  A bit of a shitty answer though when the context surrounding the discussion was about whether Google was doing anything to protect privacy. Apple, by comparison, seems to have navigated the same environment extremely well. They of course can't prevent certain things from happening, but for what's within their control, they are doing what they can.
- donalhunt 4y ago
  As someone who heard this first hand (probably at an all-hands or TGIF), the quote from the earlier post was very much not "don't use communication channels that leave a trail" and much more "don't do illegal shit". In addition, I fondly remember him quibbing that there is no internet in jail. :/ Saying that, I'll leave you in the knowledge that Google Meet is excellent for off the record conversations (and executives are great for ignoring rules set for the rest of the company).
- wmeredith 4y ago
  Schmidt doesn't get shit for saying true things. He gets shit for being a rich hypocritical asshole. At the time he was spouting his holier-than-thou bullshit, he was colluding with other high-tech firms (Apple, et al.) to suppress workers' salaries, and he was actively hiding the evidence of doing so. It came out in court anyway and Google was part of a half-billion dollar settlement over the matter. Eric Schmidt is not some misunderstood truth-sayer. He's a crook and a hypocrite and the things he says are received poorly because he's an elitist who's made his $25,000,000,000 fortune punching down.

mitchellst 4y ago

I'll add a recent misfortune for a peer company: https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/judge-sanctions-facebook-and-biglaw-firm-925k-for-delay-misdirection-and-frivolous-arguments https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/judge-sanctions-faceb... Looks like the real powers in the US are losing patience with some of the low-level legal tomfoolery of big tech. About time. Nothing against the companies, but make your money by making products people love, not by playing footsie with the court system.

autoexec 4y ago
Google thinks they are above the law and bigger and more powerful than the US government. It will be interesting to see if the courts throw the book at Google for directly disobeying them and assert themselves as having control or if they'll roll over and confirm Google as our unelected King.

1letterunixname 4y ago

Want to wipe your work computer and put a new version of Linux on it? First, check your legal hold status. Want to delete any kind of employee data? First, filter out users by legal hold status.

briffle 4y ago
I get the point you are trying to make, but usually the holding is on the servers. Most mail and communications servers allow for this.. (ie, don't actually delete any emails that mention the company ACME because of a legal hold number 123434). And I (A sysadmin) have literally been tasked with overnighting employee laptops to foresnic groups, and issuing them a brand new one. (typically, they just image the drives, and send them back, we would wipe the system, and put it back in our 'spare pool'.)
- kridsdale1 4y ago
  Before I quit Meta, we were actually told we had to do this. We could not delete files from SOURCE CODE anymore.
  - 1letterunixname 4y ago
    Which role / pillar organization?
- 1letterunixname 4y ago
  Unfortunately, your experience differs in ways that don't apply categorically to the points I made from my perspective and experience. We have hooks into the fleet of endpoints (corporate with some 10k BYODs), servers, and various vendor apps. This is realized by data legal provides reduced to a boolean per user because there's no need to convey excess detail. When an employee visits Help Desk, they are limited by the possible actions HD can take if they are under a legal hold. The same applies to certain OS upgrades, whether HD or DIY. It would be impossible to manage VDI or "throwaway" servers at scale without a centralized legal hold inquiry API. Google has (or had) a far greater corporate tech staff / employee ratio in the industry than similar companies, so there's no excuse for them not to have a comprehensive legal hold program throughout their technical organization.

kevmo 4y ago

Nothing is going to happen until we start imprisoning executives for this sort of flagrant illegal behavior. Fines and settlements mean nothing. People like Sundar Pichai, Eric Schmidt, etc need to be labeled as anti-social criminals & face the justice system.

nosefrog 4y ago

> The government said the company only committed this week to permanently preserve its employees’ chat messages—after DOJ officials informed Google they would file their motion for sanctions. As a current Google employee, I'm very happy about this change.

wunderland 4y ago

This was a shrewd move on Google's part because certainly the cost of destroying evidence will be significantly lower than any smoking gun that might have been said over chat.

bloomingeek 4y ago

I'm not worried,Google will default to their motto, "Do more evil." Wait, is that right?

qbrass 4y ago
The motto was "Don't be evil." It said nothing about how much evil you were allowed to do.

krmbzds 4y ago

https://archive.is/7SiNn https://archive.is/7SiNn

avalys 4y ago

This is regulatory and legal overreach. Yes, there are laws about preserving evidence and records. However, these laws haven't been updated to reflect how office communication has changed over the years. No one would propose, circa 1950, that companies must record every conversation between two people in the office for regulatory compliance or lawsuit discovery, etc. purposes. But effectively, that's what retention requirements for chat messages amount to. What is the principled policy argument (ignoring practicality) for requiring retention of chat messages, but not requiring every employee to wear a body camera that permanently records every work-related interaction they have IRL?

water-your-self 4y ago
This isnt equivalent to wearing a body camera. Maybe a screen recorder would warrant that comparison. Direct messages are a form of written communication
- avalys 4y ago
  The point is that we use written communication a lot more in a modern (especially remote) office than we did in 1950, and for a much broader range of purposes and interactions than when the regulations requiring records retention were written.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > This isnt equivalent to wearing a body camera. Rather, the requirement is not equivalent to a requirement to wear a body camera, but instead to a requirement that if you wear and have actively recording a body camera, you can’t destroy the recording if it is relevant to a subject of reasonably anticipated, or actually in progress, litigation.
cldellow 4y ago
Making everyone wear body cams: they weren't previously using body cams, you have to spend $ to buy them, the cams will capture me while using the washroom. Stopping the deletion of chats: an IT person has to toggle a setting. It feels pretty different to me! To roll with your 1950s analogy, it feels a lot more like the office secretaries being told that instead of shredding inter-office memos, they have to hold on to them. I realize you said ignoring practicality...but that seems like a weird constraint to add. Bureaucracies run through paperwork, so capturing emails and DMs are often sufficient, while being much less invasive and cheaper.

coliveira 4y ago

I think it is completely absurd that the government let companies get away with the policy of deleting messages. Any public and/or large enough company should be required to keep all communications, internal and external, for at least a decade. These companies are required to respond to the public. In todays world the only reason for them not to keep records is to evade responsibility for whatever they're doing wrong.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Funny how Google can ignore the privacy of internet users' conversations but when it comes to their employees' conversations, Google does not want to share those with the Government. According to the Government's memo supporting sanctions, Google is deleting conversations within 24h despite being under litigation holds. https://ia902501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.512.1.pdf https://ia902501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appearing on CNBC once said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." If Google is not doing anything wrong, then why not give the Government what it is are asking for and let justice prevail. Google collects and surveils internet users' conversations on a mass scale without a subpoena, for whatever purpose(s) it chooses, for profit. To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare, that's apparently acceptable. However when the Government subpoenas Google for Google's conversations, for the sole purpose of determining whether Google is complying with the law, Google resists. Personal data mining on billions of people. No problem. Monitoring employees to catch leakers and whistleblowers. Can do. Saving employee chats to satisty document requests from the Government. Too time-consuming and burdensome! There is perhaps no company in the world better equipped to comb through peoples' conversations.

bredren 4y ago
In Schmidt’s first tv interview on Bitcoin he also said concern over unchecked criminality was overblown. He suggested that criminals make enough opsec mistakes that would be recorded that the government need not be worried.
- HealthNeed 4y ago
  Which has mostly been born out, at least about criminals making opsec mistakes.
wmeredith 4y ago
"Rules for thee, but not for me" may actually be the oldest trick in the book. Google's hypocrisy here is disappointing, but not surprising in the least.

iepathos 4y ago

lol this checks out, but justice department cannot assert that companies are suppose to keep all internet conversations indefinitely. No precedence for that so they are just blowing smoke here huffing and puffing because they have zero evidence and that must be the defendant's fault.

cobaltoxide 4y ago

As an ex-Googler ... That auto-delete policy was extremely annoying. And even if we turned it off, it only changed from a 24 hour deletion to something like 30 days. The chats certainly wouldn't be kept permanently. Corporate data "retention" policies are entirely intended to avoid future legal "discovery." My understanding is that policies like Google's are considered "best practices". For example, my current employer deletes Slack messages after 90 days for the same reason. It is also extremely annoying. My current employer even deletes Google Docs after something like 180 days unless they are put into special folders.

bmitc 4y ago

Send people to prison and/or fine the hell out of these corporations.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Putting CEOs in prison is the only way to fix gross corporate misconduct. This is why we'll never do it.
encryptluks2 4y ago
[dead]

wang_li 4y ago

The fine needs to be large enough to wipe out all of Alphabet's profit for the period in question.

user3939382 4y ago

That’s fine. Judges in this case are instructed or instruct juries to, assume the missing evidence is maximally damaging for the defendant.

mcqueenjordan 4y ago

I really despise auto-delete policies. Obviously, because of the inconvenience and all the context/history/search capability you lose, but also because it's addressing the problem the wrong way. Rather than be accountable for your actions, the company would rather create a system to circumvent the law and sweep the evidence under the rug. Creates a terrible incentive structure. It goes to show that the company is run by lawyers. Bezos had a great bit he would always say at all hands about this kind of stuff: "Look, we are a large corporation. We deserve to be inspected. It’s going to happen. Don’t take it personally. Because when you take it personally, you start to do things that are counterproductive.” "There’s only one way to handle it, and that is that we have to conduct ourselves in such a way that when we are scrutinized, we pass with flying colors.”

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ftc-prepares-possible-antitrust-suit-against-amazon-11675438256 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/ftc-prepares-possible-antit...
- mcqueenjordan 4y ago
  That’s all well and good. I still think the quote stands on its own as a great philosophy for how to approach scrutiny as a large business. Philosophy and execution are separate!

hedora 4y ago

What’s the penalty for this? The article says “sanction”, but that probably doesn’t mean “bar domestic companies and the US government from doing business with them”. Presumably, the punishment has to be worse than what would happen if the documents proved all of the DOJ’s allegations, or there would be no incentive to obey subpoenas. (Note that, while unrealistically harsh, such a policy is probably still too lax: Deleting the documents might be the best course of action, assuming they contain shady shit the DOJ hadn’t thought of. Personal jail time for everyone above the responsible party in the org chart might make sense, especially if it included the board of directors.)

rkagerer 4y ago

The way I feel about people who choose to work at Meta is how I'm beginning to feel about those coming onboard lately with Google. Strikes me as nothing like the rosy-principled place it set out to be in the 'do no evil' days.

blindriver 4y ago

Why on earth would anyone from Google want to break the law and try to destroy evidence on behalf of Google? I highly doubt this happened the way that this article claims it happened. Google has hundreds of thousands of employees, the idea that there's a group of employees that are willing to go to jail on behalf of the company over something that is easily detected is ridiculous.

itsathrower 4y ago

"Do as I say, not as I do" said the federal government...which just updated its polices January 5 2023 to say that yes, chat messages are records too. https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/bulletins/2023/2023-02 https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/bulletins/2023/2023-02

PicassoCTs 4y ago

Forgive my query, but why is destroying evidence not seeing as admitting guilt?