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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... > Th

• 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.
      • dragonwriter 4y ago
        > From what I'm seeing they're seeking monetary fines against Google for this This is false. They are seeking a finding that Google destroyed evidence, and a hearing to assess sanctions, and an order for Google to make additional evidence available before the hearing. [0] While fines might be part of the sanctions, a very common sanction for destruction of evidence is adverse inference jury instructions in the litigation the evidence was relevant to. [0] actual motion: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.512.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
      • fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
        > 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 An oft-repeated argument, but usually not backed by any evidence or math.
  • stefan_ 4y ago
    This is not some kind of lawyer golf. Google employees with functions far outside legal wrote things like: > “Let’s not talk about markets and market share via email.” > “[W]e should chat live so you can get the history; best to not put in email.” > “Since it’s a sensitive topic, I prefer to discuss offline or over hangout.” This is of course not, in fact, some cute way around legal custodial requirements, no matter what the people who passed leetcode preached in trainings.
• 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]