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Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

wsj.com

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

#51

Post by jefftk »

omginternets wrote: post #34
jefftk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

My understanding is that adding a lawyer to a conversation isn't sufficient to shield it from discovery. Instead you actually need to (a) be asking a lawyer for legal advice, (b) not cc or otherwise share with anyone who does not need that advice, and (c) not include unrelated matters. When I've written things that actually needed to be privileged I would start a separate email, address it only to the lawyer and specific people who also needed to know the advice, and keep the thread carefully on topic.

(Not a lawyer)

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

#52

Post by kevmo »

Nothing is going to happen until we start imprisoning executives for this sort of flagrant illegal behavior. Fines and settlements mean nothing.

People like Sundar Pichai, Eric Schmidt, etc need to be labeled as anti-social criminals & face the justice system.

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

#53

Post by doubleg72 »

jvolkman wrote: post #41
Name_Chawps wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I click on trash it says "Items in trash are deleted forever after 30 days", so I don't really understand this complaint. Trash is a feature that most users have come to expect in file management systems. Also, "turn off history" - which seems to be what this complaint is about - is just a public feature of the Chat app built into gmail.

Exactly.. But the funny thing is as an IT admin at hospital, I have seen people who literally were saving mail in their trash folder in hopes to "archive" then got mad when we did some house keeping in Exchange.

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

#54

Post by justeleblanc »

omginternets wrote: post #34
jefftk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/attorney-client-privilege-abu...

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

#55

Post by cma »

tantalor wrote: post #36
jonas21 wrote: 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?

> why would that not apply to verbal communications as well?

Corporate body cams. They wanted it first for fast food register workers but maybe it comes to white collar jobs first (aside from police). It is already sort of there with work from home surveillance-ware.

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

#56

Post by Name_Chawps »

jvolkman wrote: post #41
Name_Chawps wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I click on trash it says "Items in trash are deleted forever after 30 days", so I don't really understand this complaint. Trash is a feature that most users have come to expect in file management systems. Also, "turn off history" - which seems to be what this complaint is about - is just a public feature of the Chat app built into gmail.

Yeah, but most non-technical people see that their gmail is full, try deleting a bunch of emails, see that it didn't help, and then have to buy more space. They're not aware there's a trash, they perhaps don't even use Drive at all. They just know that what they're doing isn't working.

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

#57

Post by ROTMetro »

ss108 wrote: post #14
hackernewds wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. they cannot reasonably expect every day employees with no stakes or info into the confidential dealings would care about this. Al Alongside Google wouldn't care about them not caring.

It doesn't matter. "Every day employees" are not the ones who needed to do this.

They can be if the policy was that individual employees needed to self enforce retention on XYZ topics and employees were provided training to that effect. The Feds can not say a company must retain all records going forward, only that it make reasonable effort to retain relevant records and training employees to place items going forward in some sort of vault historically qualifies, especially when this training/retention has been vetted as being acceptable by corporate/insurance company legal teams. There is no mens rea element to having system constraints due to an existing IT infrastructure budget and the Feds don't get to just blow that budget up because 'they have concerns' or else they could use 'concerns' as a weapon to destroy companies.

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

#58

Post by czx4f4bd »

Supermancho wrote: post #8
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #3

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…

> Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Google didn't do it, it was those other individuals who defied the court order. Uh huh.

That's not what that means. That's a pre-emptive argument in case Google tries to say that individual employees were responsible for preserving evidence.

> Google may argue that it relied on individual custodians to manually preserve history-off chats. But that argument should be rejected for two reasons.

> First, it is and was Google’s obligation to suspend auto-deletion policies; it is no defense to suggest that individual custodians—Google employees—owned that obligation. Samsung, 881 F. Supp. 2d at 1137 (“[I]t generally is recognized that when a company or organization has a document retention policy, it is obligated to suspend that policy . . . .”) (cleaned up) (italics added). Google designed the chat systems and document preservation policies at issue here.

> And Google elected to set the default to history off for many chats. Indeed, Google maintained the “off the record” default despite employee complaints that the default caused them to lose important conversations.19

> Second, Google cannot escape sanctions by shifting the blame to its custodians. For spoliation purposes, destruction of evidence by Google’s employees is attributable to the company. See, e.g., E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. Kolon Indus., Inc., 803 F. Supp. 2d 469, 506‒07 (E.D. Va. 2011) (“A party may be held responsible for the spoliation of relevant evidence done by its agents.”). Courts commonly sanction corporate litigants for the spoliation of their employees and executives. See, e.g., Borum, 332 F.R.D. at 42 (emails deleted by employee). Accordingly, Google violated its duty to preserve potentially relevant evidence on a daily basis from May 2019 through the present.

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

#59

Post by bogwog »

klyrs wrote: post #15
rlewkov wrote: post #9

But, but, but .... don't be evil.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only evil to a capitalist is loss of capital. The "don't be evil" motto still applies. Just not the way that you're accustomed to reading it.

> The "don't be evil" motto still applies.

Not exactly: https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

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

#60

Post by donalhunt »

megous wrote: post #42

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." ~Eric Schmidt lol

I wonder if in a decade or two, Eric's "adult supervision" era will be recognised as Google's heyday.

Eric stepped down as Google's CEO in 2011 and it could be argued that the execution since then has been meh.

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