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Epic Games, others accuse Sundar Pichai of violating retention obligations
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoThat’s a huge fuckup. If you’re going to be an evil corporation destroying evidence then why are you even using electronic communication in the first place. I don’t see how they can possibly win if they’re that openly destroying records.
- silentsea90 4y agoGoogle inconveniences the entire company by defaulting to 24hrs chat retention so they can avoid sharing sensitive info in litigation (frustrating countless employees who would have needed to refer to the chat message from yesterday about simple CLI commands/instructions etc) while getting hit by a lawsuit for intentionally purging history. Classic Google.
- andy_ppp 4y agoYou know the corporate bureaucracy has taken over completely there then. I'd be surprised if they play a big role in the coming AI wars with people making decisions like this.
- kyrra 4y agoThis policy has been in place since the Oracle lawsuit, which was the impetus for it.
- unstatusthequo 4y agoThis is not limited to Google. It’s a tactic used to frustrate the overly excitable Plaintiff bar who enjoys asking for overbroad discovery of records. It has been so pervasive that companies have designed record retention policies more limited than even they want because it cost them so much to go preserve, collect, process, review, and produce in litigation.
- lozenge 4y agoWhy do you say they enjoy it and it's overbroad? Any discovery can be disputed in front of a judge anyway.
- filoleg 4y ago> frustrating countless employees who would have needed to refer to the chat message from yesterday about simple CLI commands/instructions etc The 24-hour auto-deletion is just a default that can be easily disabled, which is what you would do in this scenario. After you disable it, none of the messages in that chat will get auto-deleted going forward. That setting isn't buried deep in the menus either. You just right-click the chat for which you want to turn on history, and then left-click the "turn on chat history" button. You do it once for a given chat, and you never have to revisit it again, it will stay turned on until you intentionally turn it off. It helps that when you open a chat with a new chat group/person, it displays in very large text in the center "Turn on chat history to prevent messages from being auto-deleted in 24 hours", so it is difficult to forget to do so either.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoWhat about the employees seemingly being told to make the chat private and the chat abruptly ending?
- filoleg 4y ago> What about the employees seemingly being told to make the chat private and the chat abruptly ending? If someone was told to make the chat private, that's a different story, and I wouldn't feel good about it either. Luckily, never heard anyone ask me to disable chat history, and my chat history has always been enabled with everyone (including group chats). Everyone is aware of it too, because it tells everyone in the chat when someone enables it.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoGoogle employees created a [redacted] Chat with history on. The Google Play Operations Program Manager Lead quickly warned the group: “[redacted]” The Lead Project Manager for Google Photos asked: “[redacted]” The on-the-record portion of the Chat abruptly ended.
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- RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y agoThe 24h limit is quite the contrast to what happens when you, as a customer, use their products: Around every corner there is a dialog which asks for permission to store extremely personal data, such as your GPS location or browsing history, indefinitely. See how much Google values its users safety vs. its own safety...
- CydeWeys 4y agoIf you click the button to delete that data, though, it is actually deleted.
- colordrops 4y agoIs it though? Who knows how Google has crafted their language and legal loopholes to "technically" delete your data in one way while retaining it in another? And that doesn't even get into things like PRISM.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vkou 4y agoPRISM was a web portal that the NSA used to serve NSLs, FISA court orders, and other requests for information to tech firms. It wasn't an all-seeing eye of Sauron that had full access to their backends.
- colordrops 4y agoYour characterization is not accurate. Please reference the government slides themselves: https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/prism.html https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/prism.html
- vkou 4y agoNothing in those slides contradicts me. The PRISM vs Upstream slide makes it very clear that PRISM requests are done through the front door, because PRISM-to-vendor communication is 'laundered' through the FBI.
- revelio 4y agoYou seem to be assuming Google will lose. Seems more likely that they will win and the article author is wrong when he says "From the outside it appears very, very difficult to imagine that Google will get away with what it's done." There is no law compelling you to write down every word, thought or discussion that takes place in the office. Google was subject to litigation holds. That means you can't destroy evidence if it might be relevant, it doesn't imply some sort of unlimited obligation to create endless documents containing every word uttered by every employee 24/7. How would that even work? The author's inability to imagine Google's lawyers successfully making this argument reflects poorly on their imaginative skills, not Google.
- bootwoot 4y agoI was taking the referenced chat conversation in the post to have occurred after the legal hold was put in place. It seems far more devious to explicitly avoid records in places that would otherwise have records when a court has already said "you need to have records". I'm not a lawyer and don't know the context that well, though, so this may be incorrect understanding on my part.
- revelio 4y agoWhether it seems devious or not to you, has no bearing on whether it's legal. The court does not say "you need to create records on this topic going forward". It says "you need to retain records you already created on this topic". One thing that may confuse people is that some industries like finance are subject to regulations that force them to create records of employee conversations even if normally they wouldn't and even if there's no pending lawsuit. But those are industry specific rules governing specific activities like trading, not a general legal concept that'd have applied to Google.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoThe records existed for 24 hours and were then deleted.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoGoogly Googler perchance? Can you set longer limits or is it all ephemeral? (We use Workplace at work that has infinite retention by default.)
- silentsea90 4y agoI am a Xoogler. You can change the default to being a month for 1-1 chats, and 6 months for channels. That's still pretty low if you ask me. One has to be remember to copy paste useful messages over to your own personal notes. Ofc, as a lowly unknown IC, none of these messages are remotely what a judge might care about, in fact I would be flattered if they did.
- Gigachad 4y agoThis sounds like a great feature. I'm not a big fan of the future we are heading towards where every conversation you ever have is logged, audited, and scanned forever. Chats should be temporary. If you were there in the moment, you hear it. If it's important to remember, you write it down on your notepad.
- mgraczyk 4y agoSure, but 24 hours is too short. It's a huge annoyance for day to day work when you interact with a large number of people and often forget to increase the retention window. Even then chats aren't kept much longer.
- rnk 4y agoThe last few big companies I worked for did this automatic chat deletion as a standard practice created by the authors. Microsoft even did this for email a long time ago when I was there. The lawyers tell them to do it as a defense mechanism. It's really common now.
- rektide 4y agoLet me get this straight... the company whose stated mission is "to organize & make universally accessible & useful all the world's information" deletes their own information every night? This is some incredible Dark City shit!
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoCan a lawyer comment on how retention laws have evolved in the past 20-25 years? Before email, hardly any informal conversation was recorded - it was done in person or on the phone. Now, though, so much of our conversations are done in recorded digital formats. But surely it's not illegal to say something like "Let's chat about this in person", even if you are under some sort of record retention decree, correct? I've just seen some law cases over the past 10 years or so where I think it's very easy to take informal conversation out of context. For a person like the CEO of Google, where tons of folks would be deliberately looking to frame any utterance in the worst possible light, I can understand wanting separate channels for informal discussion vs. official decisions/communications.
- ghaff 4y agoWe have these weird evolving conventions. We tend to increasingly use chat rather than email for contacting individuals or small groups about something. I guess I assume it's still all archived. On the other hand, we don't really call people anymore. Certainly out of the blue. Much less talk in person. But (I guess) if you want to have an off the record conversation you really need to have a call.
- gman83 4y agoWhy are calls considered off the record? Wouldn't it be trivial for those to be logged too?
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- paxys 4y agoDoes an obligation to preserve electronic communication also mean that all communication has to be done electronically? Having sensitive conversations in person or on the phone – specifically so that they aren't preserved or leaked – is how most businesses (and governments and other institutions) operate. This is seen as conventional wisdom, not some nefarious plot.
- jonstewart 4y agoNo, there’s no obligation. But not retaining records when under a legal hold can be very bad. The judge can impose sanctions/fines, and of course it can color the rest of the case and bias the jury against you.
- j45 4y agoInteresting q. Like there’s an obligation to create electronic communication records. Would going for a coffee or walking meeting be in bad faith?
- AequitasOmnibus 4y agoNo, there’s no obligation to memorialize everything in writing. But it’s a two way street. If a conversation is important enough, the parties also have incentives to write it down (to avoid recanting or conveniently forgetting or misunderstanding important terms). In court, testimonial evidence is usually presented under oath, under penalty of perjury. If a company is subverting recording information by only discussing sensitive items in person, a good lawyer will put multiple witnesses on the stand, ask them all the same questions about the sensitive topic, then poke holes in the inconsistencies and see who cracks first on the witness stand. It might be hard to get someone to disclose the sensitive subject, but it’s rather easy to catch someone in a lie or a cover up. That’s usually good enough.
- comboy 4y agoI have no idea about the subject, so can somebody explain to me why can two people at a company talk to each other without turning on any recording device but can't do that legally using text? That is if my understanding is correct.
- loeg 4y agoLawyers, legislators, and courts are all old or old-fashioned people who use phones and in-person meetings a lot. So, conveniently, there is a special historical exemption for phone calls and in-person meetings.
- maxerickson 4y agoIt's more or less inertia. At some point the legal situation for each practice was evaluated and established and here we are. Chats probably got rolled into rules established for email.
- furyofantares 4y ago> Chats probably got rolled into rules established for email. And emails I think in turn got rolled into the rules established for "documents"?
- loeg 4y agoInteroffice memoranda!
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- KKKKkkkk1 4y ago[flagged]
- user3939382 4y agoIf you destroy evidence civil procedure allows the court to consider the evidence to have been as detrimental as possible to your case. It often means you automatically lose. That’s for us plebes anyway, how that translates to these megacorps the “justice” system is there to serve I’m not sure.
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- orra 4y agoFlorian Mueller (“FOSSPatents”) prominently shilled for Oracle, back during the Google v Oracle case days. That's when Oracle were trying to destroy the right to create an open source, clean room reimplementation of an API. He doesn't give a shit about FOSS. Do not trust.
- bitwize 4y agoFlorian and the Federal Circuit were right. The Supreme Court ruling was pure legislating from the bench, and opens up a Pandora's box that may undermine the meaningfulness of copyright itself. If the design of an API is not creative expression, what exactly is?
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Florian and the Federal Circuit were right. The Supreme Court ruling was pure legislating from the bench, and opens up a Pandora’s box that may undermine the meaningfulness of copyright itself. If the design of an API is not creative expression The Supreme Court did not overrule the Federal Circuit on whether APIs are creative expression and thus subject to copyright, so why are you accusing them of legislating from the bench for doing so? They skipped over that issue, assumed (for the sake of other analysis) that the Federal Circuit got it right, concluded that Google’s use of the presumed-copyright-protected APIs was nonetheless Fair Use as a matter of law. This was pretty deliberately an effort to preserve the broader copyright eligibility issue so as to allow it to be more fully developed by the lower courts; it is the kind of issue the Supreme Court generally wouldn’t take up without a circuit split or a case that was both important and required reaching that point to decide. Having another out in a case where there was no circuit split and not even a clear answer from the responsible circuit (the Federal Circuit was supposed to apply Ninth Circuit law as binding precedent in this case, and, being generous to the Federal Circuit, the question presented is distinct enough that it isn’t perfectly clear that they did that well) made it a prime case for kicking the can down the road. Which they did, leaving the Federal Circuit decision in place, but not actually binding on any other court the way it would have been if there hadn’t been patent issues and the Ninth Circuit had ruled on the issue.
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- revelio 4y agoThis headline is very misleading. He's not being accused of deleting them. He is being accused of not creating the chat records in the first place. Legally these are different things. There's no obligation to generate as much evidence as possible just in case one day you get sued by someone who might want it. Lit holds are just that, holds, you have to hold records you already have and not destroy them. The assumption in the system is that institutions generate records as a natural matter of course, and that's what the plaintiffs are being allowed to get access to. This complaint seems very likely to fail as a result, short of some sudden change in the standard understanding of record retention laws.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> He’s not being accused of deleting them. He is being accused of not creating the chat records in the first place. Online chats exist as digital data ab initio, the issue is not creation (which had to happen for there to be a chat) but retention. The fact that the UI of a system may present things suggesting that “creating” a record is a separate act does not make it so.
- revelio 4y agoIt's perfectly possible to build a chat system that never creates any logs or recordings. Their chat system doesn't make recordings and then immediately delete them if you're chatting "off the record". Now, plaintiffs lawyers will presumably try an argument like yours but if they succeed it's not obvious why it wouldn't immediately require all meetings of all employees to be videoed and recorded in perpetuity (as a company like Google always has hundreds of in flight lawsuits), nor is it obvious why that wouldn't extend to meetings where all the participants are in the same room and thus don't need a video call at all - perpetual 24/7 surveillance.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- maxerickson 4y agoThe law isn't consistent with how it treats communication, so it's sort of obvious why a change to how one sort of communication is treated wouldn't necessarily impact a different sort of communication.
- xiphias2 4y agoI'm not sure which side I'm on actually. Do we really want to be able to give the governments the right to restrict our ability to not record things if they are done in chat (as opposed to encrypted phone call)? I know that Sundar should be the ,,bad guy'' here, but I think this is a very different case from deleting past data selectively.
- kevingadd 4y agoIt seems obvious to me that we shouldn't draw a special distinction between chats and emails. In practice most chat clients give you lots of email-like functionality unless you go out of your way to configure them not to - timestamped history, search, archival of attached images, etc. While chat is "realtime" it's often used asynchronously just like email, and it's possible to send emails in near realtime if you have notifications turned on. I would personally hope that if someone is obligated to retain records, turning on an 'auto-delete' for any kind of record would be strongly discouraged, regardless of whether it's chats, emails, voicemails, etc. They could always just talk in person, then there's no recording to delete.
- izacus 4y agoJust remember that in times of WFH this means that employees working from home now have every single personal conversation, every sentence and every word recorded forever to be used against them in any HR or other legal case. You've codified total workplace surveillance to the extent that makes Google look amateurish.
- nilawafer 4y agoeveryone knows laws dont apply to The Klepts
- 1letterunixname 4y agoOopsie. Is he under a legal hold generally or specifically?
- andrewmutz 4y agoWorkplace slack/chat has introduced an interesting change. Prior to this, these types of interactions would primarily happen in voice conversations: face to face, on the phone, maybe videoconference. And none of those media are generally retained or discoverable The switch to chat has had the unplanned consequence of making every routine interaction recorded and discoverable. It makes sense that is causing some strange and unfortunate behavior on the part of execs. Every routine conversation with a colleague is now effectively happening on the witness stand. I'm not saying Pichai was right to delete chats or avoid retention. I am just saying that discoverability of communications in the workplace has exploded as we transition to chat communications, and we need to figure out how that's going to work in the context of litigation
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- DueDilligence 4y ago[dead]
- throwaway2d3d2c 4y agoGoogle goes out its way to move conversations to chat, and reduces retention periods of chat, even nuking chats with history enabled. Email and calendar is dumped after 18 months. Internal training strongly recommends face to face and video meetings for anything that might arouse suspicions of illegality. The best thing for Google, shareholders and the employees were if it were split up. Sundar is not a leader, he is a substitute teacher. Clown show fueled by too much money.
- pverghese 4y agoIf you are making sch wild claims, atleast do it without an anonymous account. Otherwise your claims are just dubious.
- henearkr 4y agoMany other big companies do that, unfortunately.
- DannyBee 4y agoI see Florian's back. For those who don't know, he's always been aggressively anti-google. Enough so that it became an issue in Oracle vs Google as to whether Oracle was paying him. In fact, they were: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19181172 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19181172 You can judge for yourself whether he disclosed it properly. If you go back and read his endless posts about how Google was going to lose and how Oracle was clearly in the right and ..., and then compare it to the case outcome, it shows you all you need to know. In this case, it's pretty simple. If someone ordered Google to save specific people's chats, and they didn't, or their is a reasonable anticipation of litigation, they may get in trouble. Otherwise, they won't. Epic's claims were ... not crazy at least. The DOJ, at least what i read of them, were a little far out there in a number of cases They basically were claiming that because they started investigating Google 2019, Google should have saved the chats of 100k+ employees for 4 years.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoSkip the article and read the briefs. I hadn't even noticed Florian was the author.
- DannyBee 4y agoI read them before. Epic's seemed reasonable. DOJ seemed somewhat unhinged. Or at least, fairly scattershot. In any case, everyone in a case like this will always claim the other side should have disclosed something more, or ... So i take it all with a grain of salt.
- SergeAx 4y agoI am a bit lost here, and I am by no means an expert in US corporate law. Is there a law that company's CEO should always record all their conversations? What about phone calls? In-person meetings?
- ncallaway 4y agoThere is no general requirement. But, the article refers to a “litigation hold”. That’s something that will arise out of a specific lawsuit, and will be an order from a judge that says the company is required to preserve documents and other evidence that pertain to the litigation. So, not a general law that’s required all the time, but an order from a Judge in specific cases, that apply for the duration of the case.
- irjustin 4y agoWhy can't they have a chat room w/o record keeping? Why can't I? Phone call w/o recording, In person w/o recording, why can't there be a chat room w/o recording? It seems absurd you wouldn't be allowed to do this because it's a "different medium". The flip side would be you must have a voice recording device on you at all times, 100%. Or, if I write a note in disappearing ink, it's illegal. It's not destruction of evidence when the medium itself is not setup for retention. I'm not trying to defend Google vs Epic vs US - it just feels like we're willing to shoot ourselves in the foot w/ specific freedoms just to fight them.
- kevingadd 4y ago"Why can't they have a chat room w/o record keeping? Why can't I?" It turns out when a company is big enough to generate billions in revenue yearly or has tens of thousands of employees, the laws governing it are different from the laws governing an individual! This may be difficult to reason about since Corporations Are People(tm) but we apply special rules to them because they have more power than a real person. More seriously, one good reason to require reasonable record retention in big companies, is that if multiple employees at a company collude, they can do irreparable harm to others in a way that a single individual cannot. Also note that in some cases as an individual you could also be compelled to retain records, like if you're under a subpoena, afaik.
- irjustin 4y ago> More seriously, one good reason to require reasonable record retention in big companies, is that if multiple employees at a company collude, they can do irreparable harm to others in a way that a single individual cannot. This doesn't really address my concern. Why is it different to have a phone call or sitting in a meeting room, or a zoom meeting (with no recording) and doing the same thing vs doing it in chat that does not record? Why is using snapchat as a company consider "evasive" and is punishable? We're saying our freedom to have an unrecordable chat is worth giving up. A really similar fight is the encryption backdoors for chat.
- amluto 4y agoIt’s worth noting that this is apparently deliberate behavior in Google’s legal hold mechanism: https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7664657 https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7664657 > What data is protected by a hold > Chat: On-the-record (history on) Google Chat messages. … > Holds override retention rules. If a retention rule is set to purge data at the end of the retention period, data on hold isn't purged until the hold is removed. So Google build a system where, if you set it to delete data after a set time, that data will still be retained if subject to a legal hold, except for off-the-record chats. This stinks. If I were a judge, I would not be impressed.
- alexander-wilms 4y agoPlague vs. Cholera
- bleuchase 4y agoIt seems like there have been a at least a couple articles critical of Pichai in as many months. Wonder if someone is trying to undermine or replace Pichai.
- kderbyma 4y agoGood, he's been a terrible leader. ruined the company, and has not an ounce morality
- deafpolygon 4y agoWhat is Epic Games' stake in this?