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Google inconveniences the entire company by defaulting to 24hrs chat retention so they can avoid sharing sensitive info in litigation (frustrating countless emp

Google 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 ago
You 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 ago
  This policy has been in place since the Oracle lawsuit, which was the impetus for it.
unstatusthequo 4y ago
This 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 ago
  Why 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 ago
  What 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 ago
      Google 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.
      - filoleg 4y ago
        Thanks for clarifying the situation. In that specific scenario, I agree with the common sentiment of the thread. My original comment definitely was not referring to that type of a situation, so I can totally see now why it got (totally understandably) downvoted.
- silentsea90 4y ago
  My response is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225339 Even extending this to a month for DMs is short enough. 6 months for group chats is better but not very satisfactory if one wants to refer to older chats.
RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
The 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 ago
  If you click the button to delete that data, though, it is actually deleted.
  - colordrops 4y ago
    Is 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 ago
      PRISM 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 ago
        Your 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 ago
        Nothing 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 ago
You 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Whether 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 ago
      The records existed for 24 hours and were then deleted.
1letterunixname 4y ago
Googly 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 ago
  I 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 ago
This 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 ago
  Sure, 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 ago
The 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 ago
Let 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!

andy_ppp 4y ago

You 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 ago
This policy has been in place since the Oracle lawsuit, which was the impetus for it.

unstatusthequo 4y ago

This 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 ago
Why 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 ago
What 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 ago
    Google 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.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      Thanks for clarifying the situation. In that specific scenario, I agree with the common sentiment of the thread. My original comment definitely was not referring to that type of a situation, so I can totally see now why it got (totally understandably) downvoted.
silentsea90 4y ago
My response is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35225339 Even extending this to a month for DMs is short enough. 6 months for group chats is better but not very satisfactory if one wants to refer to older chats.

RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago

The 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 ago
If you click the button to delete that data, though, it is actually deleted.
- colordrops 4y ago
  Is 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 ago
    PRISM 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 ago
      Your 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 ago
        Nothing 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 ago

You 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Whether 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 ago
    The records existed for 24 hours and were then deleted.

1letterunixname 4y ago

Googly 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 ago
I 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 ago

This 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 ago
Sure, 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 ago

The 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 ago

Let 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!