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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

#111

Post by photochemsyn »

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…

When you have a corporate slogan that says "Don't Be Evil" it means there's a big internal desire to start cackling alone at night in contemplation of your own evil (Frank Herbert quote, there). Looks like they lost that struggle against temptation.

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

#112

Post by coliveira »

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…

I believe the best penalty for a big company is really to be broken up. It doesn't penalize the people working on the company or its clients, since the business continue, but it does penalize the management and board of the company for their misbehavior.

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

#113

Post by Shakahs »

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.

I think "custodians" in this case means the administrators of the chat system. It was within their power to preserve this data, and they did not do so.

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

#114

Post by amluto »

donalhunt wrote: post #78
ROTMetro wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't work like that. Done centrally. See https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7664657 The issue seems to be around use of "off the record" chat settings which are not covered by Vault (somewhat surprisingly for this audience; quite desirably for the target audience it would seem).

I’m a bit surprised no major enterprise customer has demanded that Google fix that.

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

#115

Post by 1letterunixname »

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,…

Unfortunately, your experience differs in ways that don't apply categorically to the points I made from my perspective and experience.

We have hooks into the fleet of endpoints (corporate with some 10k BYODs), servers, and various vendor apps. This is realized by data legal provides reduced to a boolean per user because there's no need to convey excess detail. When an employee visits Help Desk, they are limited by the possible actions HD can take if they are under a legal hold. The same applies to certain OS upgrades, whether HD or DIY. It would be impossible to manage VDI or "throwaway" servers at scale without a centralized legal hold inquiry API.

Google has (or had) a far greater corporate tech staff / employee ratio in the industry than similar companies, so there's no excuse for them not to have a comprehensive legal hold program throughout their technical organization.

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

#116

Post by dd36 »

jeffbee wrote: post #87
cldellow wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now we know why they phase out products so quickly! Plausible deniability!

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

#117

Post by ahh »

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.

God, do I love working in the finance industry some times.

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

#118

Post by bluGill »

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…

I would say: fire the C level executives, with no severance. At the same time halt all stock trading.

Have the top officers who remain put their division on the auction block to the highest bidder, on a sold twice system, best deal wins. That is the company as a whole is sold, in parallel all divisions are sold separately: then add up the different bids, and whoever paid more: whole company vs all the individual departments separate wins. Although there are conflicts of interests, I think the officers who remain should both be allowed to bid, and also consult to other bidders: but the consults must be in public as are their bids.

Shareholders are treated as if the company is bankrupt: government fines, remaining employees, banks, and then the lawyers all get paid. If there is money left over shareholders get it.

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

#119

Post by 1letterunixname »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #105
briffle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which role / pillar organization?
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