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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

#81

Post by alar44 »

Name_Chawps wrote: post #23
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…

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…

[dead]

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

#83

Post by klyrs »

themitigating wrote: post #26
klyrs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can criticize a person, you can criticize a company, but criticizing capitalism itself is never popular here. I've been called a communist for literally quoting Adam Smith.

Because we are talking about a specific company and their actions.

So was I. My crime is not seeing Google's ethical lapses in isolation?

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

#85

Post by cowmoo728 »

jefftk wrote: post #24

What's depressingly hilarious is that employees generally hated this behavior, because useful information would often disappear before you were done with it. For example, someone answers your question on Friday after you've left and when you check messages on Monday it's gone. Or you'd want to refer to something from a conversation a few days ago and it'd been deleted as well.

It's very annoying. I regularly get a technical question from someone and answer it in a detailed back and forth where we debug. Then I realize history was off, turn history on, and then copy paste hundreds of lines of conversation back into the same chat window so it doesn't disappear in 24 hours.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

ROTMetro wrote: post #57
ss108 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ret…

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by jeffbee »

cldellow wrote: post #74
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 that if: > All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had “put a legal hold in place” that “suspends auto-deletion.” ...then you better not be auto-deleting things for the next 3 years. The lawsuit details that the language Google used when telling the DOJ what they were protecting. Hangouts is included in that language. Google also revised their retention policies for ch…

> Hangouts is included in that language.

Well it would be funny if their counterargument is that "Hangouts" was a specific thing and the OTR chats were actually on one of that company's 600 other chat products.

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

#88

Post by joadha »

vorpalhex wrote: post #33
uoaei wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They criticized Google for holding a value they perceived to be at odds with the underlying economic system.

During a discussion of said company's defiance of a federal judge, such a critique seems pertinent to me!

We have continually observed the most powerful actors in our system abusing it in consistent ways: cornering markets, becoming monopolies, bullying smaller companies, constructing walled gardens, diminishing the concept of consumer ownership, etc.

I think we ought to allow comments like theirs in discussions like this.

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

#89

Post by throwaway29303 »

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

Mr. Schmidt also didn't want to leave paper trail[0] to avoid being sued in another case as well.

And somehow Mr. Schmidt considers himself to be a well behaved[1] person.

  "I am very well tested, I am very well behaved."

    -Eric Schmidt
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper...

[1] https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt

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

#90

Post by lesuorac »

jefftk wrote: post #27
choppaface wrote: post #17

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)

DOJ alleges that a) is factual [1]. Perhaps not in your training but I've also never seen the slides in the pdf before.

[1]: https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/03/22/memo_in_support-to-sanctio...

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