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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

#101

Post by water-your-self »

avalys wrote: post #100

This is regulatory and legal overreach. Yes, there are laws about preserving evidence and records. However, these laws haven't been updated to reflect how office communication has changed over the years. No one would propose, circa 1950, that companies must record every conversation between two people in the office for regulatory compliance or lawsuit discovery, etc. purposes. But effectively, that's what retention r…

This isnt equivalent to wearing a body camera. Maybe a screen recorder would warrant that comparison.

Direct messages are a form of written communication

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

#102

Post by bluGill »

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…

Sure, but they need to ensure that their have training and audits/enforcement to ensure the policy works for everyone who isn't intentionally trying to cheat. If it was 1/a few employee(s) who didn't do the right thing, then that employee should probably go to prison for breaking the law. That is was most who didn't do the right thing suggests that the right thing was too hard to do, and it goes back to the company. (even if it is one employee they can make the case that they didn't understand the policy for some reason, which might put liability back on the company, but this is case by case)

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

#103

Post by amluto »

1letterunixname wrote: post #61
voisin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company has the obligation and the liability if the obligation isn’t met. They should have enacted a system to ensure their obligations were met. It’s like saying “we knew we owed taxes but the employees responsible for remitting the taxes just didn’t. Oopsies”

Yep. Probably as a field in employee records API, DBMS, and/or business rules processor as a synthetic attribute called "legal_hold" to combine requirements of all legal cases and jurisdictions. Every system and process that could potentially delete data needs to check "legal_hold". One of many fun feature requirements of enterprise software that aren't necessarily needed at smaller scales.

There’s a big company called Google that, among other things, sells enterprise services, and they have a list of their apps that support litigation holds:

https://support.google.com/vault/answer/6127699?hl=en

And lo and behold, Chat supports it.

edit: as pointed out elsewhere, there is some documentation that “off-the-record” chats are exempt:

https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7664657

That seems odd to me. Off-the-record is essentially a retention rule set on a per-chat basis. A hold should override a retention policy.

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

#104

Post by irrational »

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…

Individual custodians just means employees, right? What incentive was there for employees to do this? I know that if I was told to do that, I would ignore it because I have better things to do than fiddle with settings. The only way I would do it is if they said I’d be fired if I didn’t do it or they increased my salary and decreased my other responsibilities.

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

#105

Post by kridsdale1 »

briffle wrote: post #67
1letterunixname wrote: post #49

Want to wipe your work computer and put a new version of Linux on it? First, check your legal hold status. Want to delete any kind of employee data? First, filter out users by legal hold status.

I get the point you are trying to make, but usually the holding is on the servers. Most mail and communications servers allow for this.. (ie, don't actually delete any emails that mention the company ACME because of a legal hold number 123434). And I (A sysadmin) have literally been tasked with overnighting employee laptops to foresnic groups, and issuing them a brand new one. (typically, they just image the drives,…

Before I quit Meta, we were actually told we had to do this. We could not delete files from SOURCE CODE anymore.

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

#106

Post by coliveira »

I think it is completely absurd that the government let companies get away with the policy of deleting messages. Any public and/or large enough company should be required to keep all communications, internal and external, for at least a decade. These companies are required to respond to the public. In todays world the only reason for them not to keep records is to evade responsibility for whatever they're doing wrong.

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

#107

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

#108

Post by cldellow »

avalys wrote: post #100

This is regulatory and legal overreach. Yes, there are laws about preserving evidence and records. However, these laws haven't been updated to reflect how office communication has changed over the years. No one would propose, circa 1950, that companies must record every conversation between two people in the office for regulatory compliance or lawsuit discovery, etc. purposes. But effectively, that's what retention r…

Making everyone wear body cams: they weren't previously using body cams, you have to spend $ to buy them, the cams will capture me while using the washroom.

Stopping the deletion of chats: an IT person has to toggle a setting.

It feels pretty different to me! To roll with your 1950s analogy, it feels a lot more like the office secretaries being told that instead of shredding inter-office memos, they have to hold on to them.

I realize you said ignoring practicality...but that seems like a weird constraint to add. Bureaucracies run through paperwork, so capturing emails and DMs are often sufficient, while being much less invasive and cheaper.

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

#109

Post by humanizersequel »

fencepost wrote: post #98
etothepii wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If true even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again. One assumes that if anyone had asked legal they would have been told they must switch off auto-delete. Lawyers aren't stupid they value their licence far more than their current job. I am highly doubtful there would be any written advice that said anything other than, if in doubt save.

even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again. Eh, utterly impractical but I still think there should be a way to "jail" corporations. Easy - "Your offices are closed for the duration of the sentence. Your systems are shut down for the duration. Automatic payments set up in advance can continue as long as there are funds in your bank accounts, but your staff will…

This would be disproportionately used as a tool against extremely small corporations without the budget to fight the "sentence" or weather out even a short shutdown.

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

#110

Post by jonstewart »

irrational wrote: post #104
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…

Individual custodians just means employees, right? What incentive was there for employees to do this? I know that if I was told to do that, I would ignore it because I have better things to do than fiddle with settings. The only way I would do it is if they said I’d be fired if I didn’t do it or they increased my salary and decreased my other responsibilities.

Yes, so when you get sent a “legal hold” notice, and you click on some kind of acceptance, you are basically acknowledging that you’ll get fired if you don’t preserve the data. That’s how this works. The incentive to compliance is that you don’t get fired by your general counsel.
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