15 ms·

How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

203 points by tysone 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lupire 2y ago
Is this different from retention policy at any other business with competent lawyers?
- infamia 2y ago
  Yes, these are terrible policies, which has gotten Google in hot water during litigation. Overusing Attorney-Client Privilege is a good way to get it neutered/curtailed during a trial. Moreover, the company has an affirmative duty to preserve data. Leaving it up to individual employees to retain data risks adverse inferences about the lost data, sanctions, default rulings, and worse depending on the circumstances. > It encouraged employees to put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded. > Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents. But Google exempted instant messaging from automatic legal holds. If workers were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn their chat history on. From the evidence in the trials, few did.
- ajb 2y ago
  At my previous company (a big semiconductor vendor) the legal dept made it clear that if you had a question, you did not ask them by text. You rang them, because that made it privileged. But they didn't try to escape from discovery of emails - they were retained. Actually they wanted some retention, because for them a big thing was to have evidence of the date you invented something in case of patent litigation. Everyone was given a paper journal in which you were supposed to make notes, which I totally failed to do.
  - caboteria 2y ago
    I worked for a company that was acquired by LU/Bell Labs in the '90's and their IP notebooks were excellent: hardbound with a sturdy cloth binding and thick, high-quality graph paper. We were supposed to have each page countersigned at the end of the day but that rarely happened. We were too busy makin' the donuts.
  - astrange 2y ago
    We got engineering notebooks once and then never again; I think something happened to patent law that obsoleted them. Which could just be that it became much harder to get software patents.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
It’s possible with digital tech, always on mics, and remote work that absolutely every communication within a company could be recorded forever. Would humanity be better off? Or are people stupider when they are thinking out loud in front of recording devices? How much do the lawyers deserve to know?
- bananapub 2y ago
  you don't need to wonder, go and read up on the madness that is Bridgewater Associates
  - josefritzishere 2y ago
    wtf https://www.businessinsider.com/bridgewater-associates-management-principles-training-2016-8#-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/bridgewater-associates-manag...
    - calmbonsai 2y ago
      As much as I think Dalio's "principles" are a "good thing" for personal practices they don't scale to groups--let alone a corporation. All of these "radical transparency" and "radical honesty" practices are just justifications for being lackadaisical about the nuances of human relations.
    - tdeck 2y ago
      https://archive.is/SB7J9 https://archive.is/SB7J9
- xnx 2y ago
  > every communication within a company could be recorded forever. Within 15 years we will probably wear a necklace or other device that will record [at least the audio] of our entire lives. This will have a number of positive benefits (memory augmentation, etc.) but also as train data for AI.
  - 2y ago
jakubmazanec 2y ago
https://archive.ph/T8UOD https://archive.ph/T8UOD
tqi 2y ago
These policies are in place because companies have learned that journalists will happily take any comment, from any employee, from any context, and make it Crucial Evidence(TM) of impropriety...
- bargainbot3k 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - lolinder 2y ago
    There's a difference between snooping and questioning in search of the truth versus snooping and questioning in search of a juicy story to repeat for profit. Like with the police, there's a lot of hagiography that paints journalists as the dogged researcher who will stop at nothing to expose the truth about $SUBJECT, but like with the police that trope is not the full picture. The average journalist spends a few hours collecting quotes to support a story that they have already written in their head, which they then put into writing underneath the most exciting headline they (or their editor) can imagine. They're paid to sell papers/get clicks, not to discover the truth, and it shows. With that in mind, OP is absolutely correct, and "don't talk to journalists" should be right up there with "don't talk to the police" in our guidelines for life. They're not your friend: they will destroy you if they think it'll grab enough attention.
    - bargainbot3k 2y ago
      If you’d put this much effort every day into privacy laws, neither Google nor journos would be able to snoop. But, here we are, and it’s fair game.
  - cruano 2y ago
    You say that like journalists themselves don't work for "a company"
    - bargainbot3k 2y ago
      [flagged]
cadamsau 2y ago
Seems like there’s an opportunity to build an AI B2B SaaS that flags companies’ sketchy comms to be scrubbed. No surprises here frankly; for a public company, sticking to “don’t be evil” conflicts with fiduciary duty, and only the latter is law.
- astrange 2y ago
  "Fiduciary duty" as people imagine applies to companies almost entirely doesn't exist.
- p_l 2y ago
  The fiduciary duty in law is just to not intentionally scam investors. Then turning out not a profit is a risk they took investing and you have no duty to focus on their returns.
more_corn 2y ago
Google 100% provided advice for concealment specifically targeted at future litigation. Gchat logs were specifically reduced company-wide explicitly to avoid court discovery. I personally saw the advice to cc a lawyer with a legal question in order to bring a conversation under attorney client privilege. The penalty they’re facing in now way accounts for the money they saved by concealing evidence, which basically means “keep doing it, it works!”
- changoplatanero 2y ago
  It's illegal to destroy evidence of a crime but it's not illegal to avoid creating evidence in the first place especially if you genuinely believe that you're not doing anything wrong. Generally speaking, companies are not obligated to preserve every chat forever just in case they get sued later on.
  - closeparen 2y ago
    I wonder if the widespread adoption of video chat will shake up norms here. Not recording or purging the recording from a Zoom meeting or Zoom-enabled conference room seems exactly as scandalous as using an OTR messenger or a short retention period on email.
    - unethical_ban 2y ago
      On one hand, I think corporations need to be accountable to government and the people. On the other hand, humans do not like being watched and documented constantly - I think it is a burden to society's mental well-being. I would not want to be constantly recorded in my team staff meetings, in office or in zoom.
      - closeparen 2y ago
        And I would not want my work chats or emails made public!
  - simoncion 2y ago
getpost 2y ago
If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded. There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication. Defining that, while allowing the collection of evidence of criminal activity, won't be easy, but the current state of affairs is unworkable. I don't wish to facilitate corporate crime, and it's obvious that some of Google's anti-competitive behavior is unlawful. But, I don't see any realistic alternative to what Google is doing in the current legal environment.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  > But, I don't see any realistic alternative to what Google is doing in the current legal environment. They could not commit crimes. They could not conspire to commit crimes in the future. They could be happy with having won business and stop committing crimes.
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  Is something like Signal disappearing messages illegal? I remember when Mark Cuban tried to make his CyberDust app.
  - riku_iki 2y ago
    google made internal chat messages disappeared after N days, which was disclosed in one of the trials, but I do not recollect any following punishment.
    - simoncion 2y ago
      Like many US big companies, Google activated the court-sanctioned evidence destruction machine. (AKA "Document Retention Policies") Because this form of evidence destruction is viewed as legal by the courts if you're not a "highly regulated" business like a bank, unless you've been specially and specifically ordered by the courts to preserve evidence there is no punishment for destroying evidence in this way. A few years back, Google execs did choose to continue to destroy evidence after a court ordered them to preserve evidence and turn off their evidence destruction machines. I do not remember whether or how severely they were punished. (If they were, surely the punishment was far less than it would have been for we mere peons.)
ayaros 2y ago
Google, a company who's goal is, ostensibly, to make the world's information accessible, has been working hard to conceal information about itself. The irony is palpable.
- accrual 2y ago
  Indeed they make the world's information [0] accessible [1]! [0] Excluding certain information [1] After these paid messages
raincole 2y ago
That's what happens when your society weaponized laws.
- burnte 2y ago
  Laws have always been weapons, they're the weapons the people use to protect themselves from corporations, and the weapons a society uses to ensure the health it its members.
dekhn 2y ago
I remember Urs arguing for this at TGIF quite some time ago. He said legal costs were increasing exponentially while the value of old email was only linear, which was unsustainable. One outcome of this was to wipe a number of ongoing scientific discussions I was having with external collaborators. I'm used to people having the last 30 years of mail on hand to be able to carry out extremely long, complex projects.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  Good point. To add to that, I hazard a guess that the legal costs are about collecting everything for discovery, and not necessarily about them causing Google to lose legal cases.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Not just collecting for discovery - but reviewing. Manually.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    What's amusing is that at that very time, Google was building its Email Discovery platform (https://support.google.com/a/answer/2462365?hl=en)- https://support.google.com/a/answer/2462365?hl=en)- basically a way for lawyers to search, inspect, and triage emails in an org to make them available. Yes, lawyers (billing hourly) trawl through hundreds to thousands of email then hand them over to the opposition. I talked to the eng building the product and they said they personally had to do some manual email classification to train the retrieval models and that they lost any interest in using email after seeing what people put it their corporate email.
- telotortium 2y ago
  Did they not have the indef label at that time? In any case, at some point your collaborators will leave institutions and thus get a new email address. What happens then?
- okdood64 2y ago
  > He said legal costs were increasing exponentially while the value of old email was only linear Uh this sounds cool at first when you say it, but what does it actually mean? Can't he just say legal costs of keeping that email is more than the value of it. How did he derive exponential?
lxgr 2y ago
> put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded Wow. One of the very first things I learned when onboarding to a US company is that the client-attorney privilege does not work like that at all. “Privileged and confidential” is not a legal shibboleth (especially not when used so incorrectly).
- eftychis 2y ago
  Yes, and it can actually backfire, by opening the floodgates to all communications. (As you lose all credibility after some point.) You are just betting nobody is going to keep digging.
- skybrian 2y ago
  I'm a little skeptical of the article, because I know that it's not a legal shibboleth, and I think I learned it when working at Google quite a long time ago.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mikeyouse 2y ago
  We’re not even allowed to add watchers to our legal Jira since our lawyers have told us it destroys privilege if there are multiple people in the discussion with the legal team. No chance if that’s true that a “cc:Lawyer” would provide any meaningful protection.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  I suspect "put “attorney-client privileged” on documents" is only a policy in specific areas within Google due to poor leadership in those specific areas, and that's being magnified for clicks/outrage.
- bobbylarrybobby 2y ago
  I imagine that this is done to pollute the corpus. When lawyers do want to eventually wade through Google’s docs, if every doc says it's privileged, then they have to wonder: can that notice be ignored on this doc, or is it actually privileged? (This does hinge on “crying wolf” not invalidating the privilege of actually privileged documents.)
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
This is totally true of a number of large companies including most of big tech. Bad retention of communications, overuse of attorney privilege, using euphemisms or code words, etc are all standard. They hide their truly damaging intentions but it’s an open secret within these companies. Different regulations are needed to fix it.
swayvil 2y ago
We trust lawyers and software, and lawyers not so much. Lol. I see a humanless future for Google, perfect security.
gandalfgeek 2y ago
This is a BS story. Pretty much every public company, at least every bigtech company, follows the same conventions -- don't say incriminating things in chat, trainings for "communicate with care" (definitely don't say "we will kill the competition!!" in email or chat), automatic retention policy etc etc. No need to single out Google.
- klabb3 2y ago
  > definitely don't say "we will kill the competition!!" in email or chat My first reaction when I went through this training was that the US legal system is completely absurd in the context of corporations, and can't result in anything but absurd outcomes, whether the litigation is successful or not. There's quite literally a guidebook that says "don't say 'kill the competition', say 'we will make the best product' instead", etc. It's an obsession with words, and while I can understand how that's important in some civil cases, it's (a) trivial to conceal the coded speech to the point of cringe (see exhibit A: the TV show Billions, where the phrase "I am not uncertain" is used to somehow create plausible deniability), (b) you're gonna get a bunch of false positives from non-decision makers talking colloquially and sarcastically to each other and most importantly (c) it's completely meaningless anyway because intent means nothing to an amoral corporation. Wrongdoing by giant behemoths should be judged by what the company does, did they compete unfairly or not. Their nifty word-weaseling, or a random employee's clumsy lack thereof, should have no bearing on the case.
CatWChainsaw 2y ago
I can only imagine that institutional knowledge will slip through the cracks thanks to sleazy retention policies made to thwart lawsuits. Tech debt will accumulate until it implodes.
eftychis 2y ago
Two comments, directed to the majority of discussions: a) It is ironic and indefensible how a company known for storing and gathering the world's information, engages directly in a massive evidence spoliation strategy in direct violation of the Duty to Preserve as outlined in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37) That is deletes information. “Google had a top-down corporate policy of ‘Don’t save anything that could possibly make us look bad,’” she said. “And that makes Google look bad. If they’ve got nothing to hide, people think, why are they acting like they do?” b) I think and I hope we have not heard the end of this. There are worse things to do than being found as an individual to have violated anti-trust laws, I don't know say have actively setup and organized thousands of people to directly obstruct justice and destroy records to hide such actions: 18 USC §§1503, 1512(c)... (See https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512) "Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the Epic case, said that there was “an ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence within Google” and that the company’s behavior was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” He added that after the trial, he was “going to get to the bottom” of who was responsible at Google for allowing this behavior." You have the DoJ and three judges looking at you with your pants down. I hope this is the beginning honestly, otherwise what message does it send to every other entity out there? Imagine this happening on any interaction you have as a consumer or employee.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  > It is ironic and indefensible how a company known for storing and gathering the world's information, engages directly in a massive evidence spoliation... That is deletes information. Not at all. Obviously, Google's mission is to organize the world's public information. You don't want Google organizing your personal Gmail for the world to see, do you? So why would you expect Google to organize its own instant messages for the world to see? > You have the DoJ and three judges looking at you with your pants down. Judges disagree with each other. All the time. Investigations often don't even make it to trial because there isn't a good case in the end. And just because you have judges investigating you doesn't mean you're guilty. Presumption of innocence and all that, you know?
gerash 2y ago
The story is simple: Google communication culture started as open and relaxed so people could go on a public internal forum and say their opinion "I think if we add x, y, z feature we can kill the competition". This is nothing specific to Google, it happens perhaps everywhere but Google wasn't policing it in written communication. Then all these written opinions were gobbled up by lawyers during the discovery phase of endless lawsuits Google has to defend. It created constant headache so they said, we'll auto delete chats older than a few days unless you opt-out. Now a court and this article say they are destroying evidence. I've personally lost my trust in both the media and the legal system honestly. The incentives are just not aligned with good outcomes. The incentive for the media is more and more drama and the incentives for lawyers is always adversarial depending on who they represent.
- mmooss 2y ago
  You see Google as an innocent victim? > Google communication culture started as open and relaxed so people could go on a public internal forum and say their opinion "I think if we add x, y, z feature we can kill the competition". This is nothing specific to Google, it happens perhaps everywhere but Google wasn't policing it in written communication. What is specific to Google is that they have monopolies, and it's illegal to use that power to kill the competition. One solution is for a manager or executive to say, 'no, we can't do that' instead of promoting the idea.
  - gerash 2y ago
    I'm talking about an internal forum. people don't ask for their manager's permission or review before leaving a comment on an internal forum.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  There's precedent of this at many places. One of the better-known instances, at least for Geeks Of a Certain Age, was "Bad Attitude", the unofficial group chat for Netscape, run personally by jwz. He'd written about the consequences of that being included within the scope of discovery by Microsoft lawyers during Netscape's actions against that company. From 1998: <https://archive.is/1bYB6 https://archive.is/1bYB6> (Archive link to avoid jwz's treatment of HN referrer headers.)
siliconc0w 2y ago
I think this happens at pretty much every company but Google is particularly effective at it and/or just got called on it. I'd bet that most tech execs have been trained to take the juicy stuff off of official comms altogether and use some privacy preserving mediums like signal or telegram - probably colluding with 'competitors' there as well.
yonran 2y ago
Governments have similar problems too: activists/journalists can make sunshine requests of day-to-day communication on a daily basis to find any written mistakes to turn into PR nightmares. This incentivizes politicians to delete their texts regularly to avoid the hassle https://missionlocal.org/2024/10/s-f-mayor-city-attorney-broke-law-by-deleting-texts-task-force-says/ https://missionlocal.org/2024/10/s-f-mayor-city-attorney-bro.... Willie Brown also famously told people that the e in email stands for evidence.
- mmooss 2y ago
  > turn into PR nightmares Shouldn't corruption be a PR nightmare?
  - yonran 2y ago
    It’s not only corruption that can get you into trouble with an adversary who is fishing for trouble, but also mistakes, imprecise language that can be taken out of context, speaking out of ignorance or partial information, unprofessionalism, unpopular opinions, etc. If you know that anything that you say to your coworkers will be publicized by a third party with the intent to ruin your career, then you either should self-censor to use corporate speak any time you text anyone, or you and your coworkers should delete your texts and emails to reduce liability.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      > anything that you say to your coworkers will be publicized by a third party with the intent to ruin your career I don't know anyone that has happened to, do you? I think that risk is absurdly over-exaggerated, and IME people who it does happen to, and complain about it, are actually guilty.
      - yonran 2y ago
        Here’s one example: In 2015 Planning Commissioner Christine Johnson was swayed by popular opinion to vote for a provision requiring registration numbers on short-term rental listings (which was later ruled to violate the Communications Decency Act until a couple more years of revisions), but then she changed her vote after a text from the Mayor’s office who appointed her. The newspaper sunshine’d the texts (https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/planning-commissioner-changed-controversial-airbnb-vote-after-text-message-from-mayor-s-office/article_a2b1caeb-99ac-5488-babf-41e05c19a15e.html https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/planning-commissioner-change...). It wasn’t corruption to take advice from the Mayor (who was right that it was not enforceable), but it was embarrassing and in 2018 she lost her election for supervisor. Here’s another article based on sunshining web browser history during a meeting that I thought had questionable newsworthiness https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/facebook-food-reservations-flights-where-sf-supervisors-browse-during-board-bored-meetings/article_59b67d10-f668-5fa4-a737-24d841158f98.html https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/facebook-food-reservations-f.... Imagine if someone had compromising website visits such as porn. On the other hand, I do see the importance of making records auditable. The school board wasted $15 million switching payroll providers and no one has published an investigation into who exactly made the key decisions. I imagine that emails would be very useful but they are probably all deleted. https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/12/san-francisco-may-dump-troubled-school-payroll-system/ https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/12/san-francisco-may-dump-tro... I think we need to strike a better balance such that text messages and personal browser history is not sunshinable, but design docs and official decisions and work are retained.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://web.archive.org/web/20241120125505/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/technology/google-antitrust-employee-messages.html https://web.archive.org/web/20241120125505/https://www.nytim...
froh 2y ago
I wonder how deleting emails works with sarbanes oxley? don't you have to keep any records that may affect the bottom line, down to the individual who created the information item? that's what they told us back when S-O was introduced.

203 points by tysone 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lupire 2y ago

Is this different from retention policy at any other business with competent lawyers?

infamia 2y ago
Yes, these are terrible policies, which has gotten Google in hot water during litigation. Overusing Attorney-Client Privilege is a good way to get it neutered/curtailed during a trial. Moreover, the company has an affirmative duty to preserve data. Leaving it up to individual employees to retain data risks adverse inferences about the lost data, sanctions, default rulings, and worse depending on the circumstances. > It encouraged employees to put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded. > Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents. But Google exempted instant messaging from automatic legal holds. If workers were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn their chat history on. From the evidence in the trials, few did.
ajb 2y ago
At my previous company (a big semiconductor vendor) the legal dept made it clear that if you had a question, you did not ask them by text. You rang them, because that made it privileged. But they didn't try to escape from discovery of emails - they were retained. Actually they wanted some retention, because for them a big thing was to have evidence of the date you invented something in case of patent litigation. Everyone was given a paper journal in which you were supposed to make notes, which I totally failed to do.
- caboteria 2y ago
  I worked for a company that was acquired by LU/Bell Labs in the '90's and their IP notebooks were excellent: hardbound with a sturdy cloth binding and thick, high-quality graph paper. We were supposed to have each page countersigned at the end of the day but that rarely happened. We were too busy makin' the donuts.
- astrange 2y ago
  We got engineering notebooks once and then never again; I think something happened to patent law that obsoleted them. Which could just be that it became much harder to get software patents.

mensetmanusman 2y ago

It’s possible with digital tech, always on mics, and remote work that absolutely every communication within a company could be recorded forever. Would humanity be better off? Or are people stupider when they are thinking out loud in front of recording devices? How much do the lawyers deserve to know?

bananapub 2y ago
you don't need to wonder, go and read up on the madness that is Bridgewater Associates
- josefritzishere 2y ago
  wtf https://www.businessinsider.com/bridgewater-associates-management-principles-training-2016-8#-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/bridgewater-associates-manag...
  - calmbonsai 2y ago
    As much as I think Dalio's "principles" are a "good thing" for personal practices they don't scale to groups--let alone a corporation. All of these "radical transparency" and "radical honesty" practices are just justifications for being lackadaisical about the nuances of human relations.
  - tdeck 2y ago
    https://archive.is/SB7J9 https://archive.is/SB7J9
xnx 2y ago
> every communication within a company could be recorded forever. Within 15 years we will probably wear a necklace or other device that will record [at least the audio] of our entire lives. This will have a number of positive benefits (memory augmentation, etc.) but also as train data for AI.
- 2y ago

jakubmazanec 2y ago

https://archive.ph/T8UOD https://archive.ph/T8UOD

tqi 2y ago

These policies are in place because companies have learned that journalists will happily take any comment, from any employee, from any context, and make it Crucial Evidence(TM) of impropriety...

bargainbot3k 2y ago
[flagged]
- lolinder 2y ago
  There's a difference between snooping and questioning in search of the truth versus snooping and questioning in search of a juicy story to repeat for profit. Like with the police, there's a lot of hagiography that paints journalists as the dogged researcher who will stop at nothing to expose the truth about $SUBJECT, but like with the police that trope is not the full picture. The average journalist spends a few hours collecting quotes to support a story that they have already written in their head, which they then put into writing underneath the most exciting headline they (or their editor) can imagine. They're paid to sell papers/get clicks, not to discover the truth, and it shows. With that in mind, OP is absolutely correct, and "don't talk to journalists" should be right up there with "don't talk to the police" in our guidelines for life. They're not your friend: they will destroy you if they think it'll grab enough attention.
  - bargainbot3k 2y ago
    If you’d put this much effort every day into privacy laws, neither Google nor journos would be able to snoop. But, here we are, and it’s fair game.
- cruano 2y ago
  You say that like journalists themselves don't work for "a company"
  - bargainbot3k 2y ago
    [flagged]

cadamsau 2y ago

Seems like there’s an opportunity to build an AI B2B SaaS that flags companies’ sketchy comms to be scrubbed. No surprises here frankly; for a public company, sticking to “don’t be evil” conflicts with fiduciary duty, and only the latter is law.

astrange 2y ago
"Fiduciary duty" as people imagine applies to companies almost entirely doesn't exist.
p_l 2y ago
The fiduciary duty in law is just to not intentionally scam investors. Then turning out not a profit is a risk they took investing and you have no duty to focus on their returns.

more_corn 2y ago

Google 100% provided advice for concealment specifically targeted at future litigation. Gchat logs were specifically reduced company-wide explicitly to avoid court discovery. I personally saw the advice to cc a lawyer with a legal question in order to bring a conversation under attorney client privilege. The penalty they’re facing in now way accounts for the money they saved by concealing evidence, which basically means “keep doing it, it works!”

changoplatanero 2y ago
It's illegal to destroy evidence of a crime but it's not illegal to avoid creating evidence in the first place especially if you genuinely believe that you're not doing anything wrong. Generally speaking, companies are not obligated to preserve every chat forever just in case they get sued later on.
- closeparen 2y ago
  I wonder if the widespread adoption of video chat will shake up norms here. Not recording or purging the recording from a Zoom meeting or Zoom-enabled conference room seems exactly as scandalous as using an OTR messenger or a short retention period on email.
  - unethical_ban 2y ago
    On one hand, I think corporations need to be accountable to government and the people. On the other hand, humans do not like being watched and documented constantly - I think it is a burden to society's mental well-being. I would not want to be constantly recorded in my team staff meetings, in office or in zoom.
    - closeparen 2y ago
      And I would not want my work chats or emails made public!
- simoncion 2y ago

getpost 2y ago

If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded. There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication. Defining that, while allowing the collection of evidence of criminal activity, won't be easy, but the current state of affairs is unworkable. I don't wish to facilitate corporate crime, and it's obvious that some of Google's anti-competitive behavior is unlawful. But, I don't see any realistic alternative to what Google is doing in the current legal environment.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
> But, I don't see any realistic alternative to what Google is doing in the current legal environment. They could not commit crimes. They could not conspire to commit crimes in the future. They could be happy with having won business and stop committing crimes.
Mistletoe 2y ago
Is something like Signal disappearing messages illegal? I remember when Mark Cuban tried to make his CyberDust app.
- riku_iki 2y ago
  google made internal chat messages disappeared after N days, which was disclosed in one of the trials, but I do not recollect any following punishment.
  - simoncion 2y ago
    Like many US big companies, Google activated the court-sanctioned evidence destruction machine. (AKA "Document Retention Policies") Because this form of evidence destruction is viewed as legal by the courts if you're not a "highly regulated" business like a bank, unless you've been specially and specifically ordered by the courts to preserve evidence there is no punishment for destroying evidence in this way. A few years back, Google execs did choose to continue to destroy evidence after a court ordered them to preserve evidence and turn off their evidence destruction machines. I do not remember whether or how severely they were punished. (If they were, surely the punishment was far less than it would have been for we mere peons.)

ayaros 2y ago

Google, a company who's goal is, ostensibly, to make the world's information accessible, has been working hard to conceal information about itself. The irony is palpable.

accrual 2y ago
Indeed they make the world's information [0] accessible [1]! [0] Excluding certain information [1] After these paid messages

raincole 2y ago

That's what happens when your society weaponized laws.

burnte 2y ago
Laws have always been weapons, they're the weapons the people use to protect themselves from corporations, and the weapons a society uses to ensure the health it its members.

dekhn 2y ago

I remember Urs arguing for this at TGIF quite some time ago. He said legal costs were increasing exponentially while the value of old email was only linear, which was unsustainable. One outcome of this was to wipe a number of ongoing scientific discussions I was having with external collaborators. I'm used to people having the last 30 years of mail on hand to be able to carry out extremely long, complex projects.

Ferret7446 2y ago
Good point. To add to that, I hazard a guess that the legal costs are about collecting everything for discovery, and not necessarily about them causing Google to lose legal cases.
- lazide 2y ago
  Not just collecting for discovery - but reviewing. Manually.
- dekhn 2y ago
  What's amusing is that at that very time, Google was building its Email Discovery platform (https://support.google.com/a/answer/2462365?hl=en)- https://support.google.com/a/answer/2462365?hl=en)- basically a way for lawyers to search, inspect, and triage emails in an org to make them available. Yes, lawyers (billing hourly) trawl through hundreds to thousands of email then hand them over to the opposition. I talked to the eng building the product and they said they personally had to do some manual email classification to train the retrieval models and that they lost any interest in using email after seeing what people put it their corporate email.
telotortium 2y ago
Did they not have the indef label at that time? In any case, at some point your collaborators will leave institutions and thus get a new email address. What happens then?
okdood64 2y ago
> He said legal costs were increasing exponentially while the value of old email was only linear Uh this sounds cool at first when you say it, but what does it actually mean? Can't he just say legal costs of keeping that email is more than the value of it. How did he derive exponential?

lxgr 2y ago

> put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded Wow. One of the very first things I learned when onboarding to a US company is that the client-attorney privilege does not work like that at all. “Privileged and confidential” is not a legal shibboleth (especially not when used so incorrectly).

eftychis 2y ago
Yes, and it can actually backfire, by opening the floodgates to all communications. (As you lose all credibility after some point.) You are just betting nobody is going to keep digging.
skybrian 2y ago
I'm a little skeptical of the article, because I know that it's not a legal shibboleth, and I think I learned it when working at Google quite a long time ago.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mikeyouse 2y ago
We’re not even allowed to add watchers to our legal Jira since our lawyers have told us it destroys privilege if there are multiple people in the discussion with the legal team. No chance if that’s true that a “cc:Lawyer” would provide any meaningful protection.
Ferret7446 2y ago
I suspect "put “attorney-client privileged” on documents" is only a policy in specific areas within Google due to poor leadership in those specific areas, and that's being magnified for clicks/outrage.
bobbylarrybobby 2y ago
I imagine that this is done to pollute the corpus. When lawyers do want to eventually wade through Google’s docs, if every doc says it's privileged, then they have to wonder: can that notice be ignored on this doc, or is it actually privileged? (This does hinge on “crying wolf” not invalidating the privilege of actually privileged documents.)

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

This is totally true of a number of large companies including most of big tech. Bad retention of communications, overuse of attorney privilege, using euphemisms or code words, etc are all standard. They hide their truly damaging intentions but it’s an open secret within these companies. Different regulations are needed to fix it.

swayvil 2y ago

We trust lawyers and software, and lawyers not so much. Lol. I see a humanless future for Google, perfect security.

gandalfgeek 2y ago

This is a BS story. Pretty much every public company, at least every bigtech company, follows the same conventions -- don't say incriminating things in chat, trainings for "communicate with care" (definitely don't say "we will kill the competition!!" in email or chat), automatic retention policy etc etc. No need to single out Google.

klabb3 2y ago
> definitely don't say "we will kill the competition!!" in email or chat My first reaction when I went through this training was that the US legal system is completely absurd in the context of corporations, and can't result in anything but absurd outcomes, whether the litigation is successful or not. There's quite literally a guidebook that says "don't say 'kill the competition', say 'we will make the best product' instead", etc. It's an obsession with words, and while I can understand how that's important in some civil cases, it's (a) trivial to conceal the coded speech to the point of cringe (see exhibit A: the TV show Billions, where the phrase "I am not uncertain" is used to somehow create plausible deniability), (b) you're gonna get a bunch of false positives from non-decision makers talking colloquially and sarcastically to each other and most importantly (c) it's completely meaningless anyway because intent means nothing to an amoral corporation. Wrongdoing by giant behemoths should be judged by what the company does, did they compete unfairly or not. Their nifty word-weaseling, or a random employee's clumsy lack thereof, should have no bearing on the case.

CatWChainsaw 2y ago

I can only imagine that institutional knowledge will slip through the cracks thanks to sleazy retention policies made to thwart lawsuits. Tech debt will accumulate until it implodes.

eftychis 2y ago

Two comments, directed to the majority of discussions: a) It is ironic and indefensible how a company known for storing and gathering the world's information, engages directly in a massive evidence spoliation strategy in direct violation of the Duty to Preserve as outlined in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37 https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37) That is deletes information. “Google had a top-down corporate policy of ‘Don’t save anything that could possibly make us look bad,’” she said. “And that makes Google look bad. If they’ve got nothing to hide, people think, why are they acting like they do?” b) I think and I hope we have not heard the end of this. There are worse things to do than being found as an individual to have violated anti-trust laws, I don't know say have actively setup and organized thousands of people to directly obstruct justice and destroy records to hide such actions: 18 USC §§1503, 1512(c)... (See https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512) "Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the Epic case, said that there was “an ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence within Google” and that the company’s behavior was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” He added that after the trial, he was “going to get to the bottom” of who was responsible at Google for allowing this behavior." You have the DoJ and three judges looking at you with your pants down. I hope this is the beginning honestly, otherwise what message does it send to every other entity out there? Imagine this happening on any interaction you have as a consumer or employee.

crazygringo 2y ago
> It is ironic and indefensible how a company known for storing and gathering the world's information, engages directly in a massive evidence spoliation... That is deletes information. Not at all. Obviously, Google's mission is to organize the world's public information. You don't want Google organizing your personal Gmail for the world to see, do you? So why would you expect Google to organize its own instant messages for the world to see? > You have the DoJ and three judges looking at you with your pants down. Judges disagree with each other. All the time. Investigations often don't even make it to trial because there isn't a good case in the end. And just because you have judges investigating you doesn't mean you're guilty. Presumption of innocence and all that, you know?

gerash 2y ago

The story is simple: Google communication culture started as open and relaxed so people could go on a public internal forum and say their opinion "I think if we add x, y, z feature we can kill the competition". This is nothing specific to Google, it happens perhaps everywhere but Google wasn't policing it in written communication. Then all these written opinions were gobbled up by lawyers during the discovery phase of endless lawsuits Google has to defend. It created constant headache so they said, we'll auto delete chats older than a few days unless you opt-out. Now a court and this article say they are destroying evidence. I've personally lost my trust in both the media and the legal system honestly. The incentives are just not aligned with good outcomes. The incentive for the media is more and more drama and the incentives for lawyers is always adversarial depending on who they represent.

mmooss 2y ago
You see Google as an innocent victim? > Google communication culture started as open and relaxed so people could go on a public internal forum and say their opinion "I think if we add x, y, z feature we can kill the competition". This is nothing specific to Google, it happens perhaps everywhere but Google wasn't policing it in written communication. What is specific to Google is that they have monopolies, and it's illegal to use that power to kill the competition. One solution is for a manager or executive to say, 'no, we can't do that' instead of promoting the idea.
- gerash 2y ago
  I'm talking about an internal forum. people don't ask for their manager's permission or review before leaving a comment on an internal forum.
dredmorbius 2y ago
There's precedent of this at many places. One of the better-known instances, at least for Geeks Of a Certain Age, was "Bad Attitude", the unofficial group chat for Netscape, run personally by jwz. He'd written about the consequences of that being included within the scope of discovery by Microsoft lawyers during Netscape's actions against that company. From 1998: <https://archive.is/1bYB6 https://archive.is/1bYB6> (Archive link to avoid jwz's treatment of HN referrer headers.)

siliconc0w 2y ago

I think this happens at pretty much every company but Google is particularly effective at it and/or just got called on it. I'd bet that most tech execs have been trained to take the juicy stuff off of official comms altogether and use some privacy preserving mediums like signal or telegram - probably colluding with 'competitors' there as well.

yonran 2y ago

Governments have similar problems too: activists/journalists can make sunshine requests of day-to-day communication on a daily basis to find any written mistakes to turn into PR nightmares. This incentivizes politicians to delete their texts regularly to avoid the hassle https://missionlocal.org/2024/10/s-f-mayor-city-attorney-broke-law-by-deleting-texts-task-force-says/ https://missionlocal.org/2024/10/s-f-mayor-city-attorney-bro.... Willie Brown also famously told people that the e in email stands for evidence.

mmooss 2y ago
> turn into PR nightmares Shouldn't corruption be a PR nightmare?
- yonran 2y ago
  It’s not only corruption that can get you into trouble with an adversary who is fishing for trouble, but also mistakes, imprecise language that can be taken out of context, speaking out of ignorance or partial information, unprofessionalism, unpopular opinions, etc. If you know that anything that you say to your coworkers will be publicized by a third party with the intent to ruin your career, then you either should self-censor to use corporate speak any time you text anyone, or you and your coworkers should delete your texts and emails to reduce liability.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    > anything that you say to your coworkers will be publicized by a third party with the intent to ruin your career I don't know anyone that has happened to, do you? I think that risk is absurdly over-exaggerated, and IME people who it does happen to, and complain about it, are actually guilty.
    - yonran 2y ago
      Here’s one example: In 2015 Planning Commissioner Christine Johnson was swayed by popular opinion to vote for a provision requiring registration numbers on short-term rental listings (which was later ruled to violate the Communications Decency Act until a couple more years of revisions), but then she changed her vote after a text from the Mayor’s office who appointed her. The newspaper sunshine’d the texts (https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/planning-commissioner-changed-controversial-airbnb-vote-after-text-message-from-mayor-s-office/article_a2b1caeb-99ac-5488-babf-41e05c19a15e.html https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/planning-commissioner-change...). It wasn’t corruption to take advice from the Mayor (who was right that it was not enforceable), but it was embarrassing and in 2018 she lost her election for supervisor. Here’s another article based on sunshining web browser history during a meeting that I thought had questionable newsworthiness https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/facebook-food-reservations-flights-where-sf-supervisors-browse-during-board-bored-meetings/article_59b67d10-f668-5fa4-a737-24d841158f98.html https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/facebook-food-reservations-f.... Imagine if someone had compromising website visits such as porn. On the other hand, I do see the importance of making records auditable. The school board wasted $15 million switching payroll providers and no one has published an investigation into who exactly made the key decisions. I imagine that emails would be very useful but they are probably all deleted. https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/12/san-francisco-may-dump-troubled-school-payroll-system/ https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/12/san-francisco-may-dump-tro... I think we need to strike a better balance such that text messages and personal browser history is not sunshinable, but design docs and official decisions and work are retained.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Works where archive.ph is blocked: https://web.archive.org/web/20241120125505/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/technology/google-antitrust-employee-messages.html https://web.archive.org/web/20241120125505/https://www.nytim...

froh 2y ago

I wonder how deleting emails works with sarbanes oxley? don't you have to keep any records that may affect the bottom line, down to the individual who created the information item? that's what they told us back when S-O was introduced.