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Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

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Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#31

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

I’m curious, what is the legal process for dealing with manufactured privilege?

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#33
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Economics isn't culture. "Culture war" isn't just "disagreements", it's disagreements about things that only exist in the realm of culture, e.g. saggy pants or watching people of the same gender kiss on TV. Economics, in fact, plays a central role here, given the profit motive that, to the bad actors, justifies these actions despite their illegality.

> A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices.[1] It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

It sounds like you are confusing culture with aesthetics.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#34
post #27

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

> always CC a lawyer and ask a question People would add lawyers like this, but (a) it wasn't something the trainings said to do, (b) the lawyers hated it, and (c) it doesn't work. (I used to work at Google, speaking only for myself)

When does it not work, generally speaking?

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#35

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-s... > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few cu…

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 s…

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).

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#36
post #32

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

I think the argument is, if you are on a lit hold and preserving some of your written communications, then you have to preserve all of them. You can't decide to shield some of them. That makes sense, I guess, but why would that not apply to verbal communications as well?

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#38

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-s... > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few cu…

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.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#39

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-s... > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few cu…

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 s…

My Gmail Trash folder auto deletes after 30 days. I have never made that as a change, its a default.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#40

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-s... > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few cu…

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 s…

Hard delete without recourse is a horrible user experience for most.
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