I'm not worried,Google will default to their motto, "Do more evil." Wait, is that right?
The motto was "Don't be evil." It said nothing about how much evil you were allowed to do.
Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
121–130 of 341 posts
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#122https://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…
> 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.
Very much so. Leaving aside some of the other points made on this, there's also a "eh, it's obviously not -that- important if it's not being enforced by policy/admin..."
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#123Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then companies will just get rid of chat tools because informal discussions can be turned to fit any narrative. 'wow, Bob picked the worst possible way to solve xyz' negligence, knowingly having incompetent developers. You yourself said Bob's solutions were the worst possible. 'looking back, we should have implemented XYZ differently but we are stuck with that implementation now' can be about something harmless but b…
Companies can't get rid of chat tools anymore than previous bureaucracies could stop using paper. Operating at current scale requires digital communication. If they tried to cut that off, they'd discover that things stopped working. Twitter gave us an example of that just this week: https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musk...
True, but saving paper was a lot more work. Most paper memos got read and put into the trash as you didn't have space to save it. Even if there wasn't a review everything saved policy you still did just because it was sitting in your office until you got rid of it. Of course when something did have to be saved you gave it to your secretary to file and wouldn't review it latter to see if it should go, but if it stayed in your office it didn't last much longer than you needed it.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#125What'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.
One of many completely dysfunctional things I hated in my short stint there not long ago. Just an incredibly employee-hostile setting for doing remote work.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like there were disagreements between Google's lawyers and the DOJ lawyers on the scope of the hold and what constitutes "reasonable."
The consequences of being found to have destroyed evidence is one of the reasons why organizations generally treat litigation / potential litigation holds broadly. (Also, unless you know there is no possible way something could be beneficial, you never know what, touching on the broad issue of litigation, you might actually need yourself, e.g., to rebut an argument from the other side.)
From what I'm seeing they're seeking monetary fines against Google for this, and at their scale that's hardly a deterrent. It always works out to be a fraction of what they'd actually have to pay if they hadn't pulled whatever bullshit got them fined, and in the end won't impact them or their bottom line in the slightest. Until the fines are high enough to actually deter them, or they start pressing criminal charges for shit like this, nothing gonna change with these huge megacorps.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hyrum's law strikes again! Perhaps users wouldn't have been surprised if the deletion policy had been applied consistently.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think they were trying to shift liability, I think they were trying to make sure all the data was deleted, without themselves having to hit delete. It's their counsel's culpability that is being protected, i.e. the difference between being negligent or willful.
When are regulators and enforcers going to wise up to this "clever" game of disguising malicious behavior as negligence? I've seen so many people strategically play dumb that at this point I don't believe whether or not a violation was accidental should have any weight on the punishment. Nature doesn't care whether our immune systems accidentally slack off, or whether we accidentally didn't protect our cities from a…
I think people being negligent legitimately happens quite a bit. I agree though that when it comes to corporate behaviour, negligence should just be treated as willful intent.
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
The consequences of being found to have destroyed evidence is one of the reasons why organizations generally treat litigation / potential litigation holds broadly. (Also, unless you know there is no possible way something could be beneficial, you never know what, touching on the broad issue of litigation, you might actually need yourself, e.g., to rebut an argument from the other side.)
From what I'm seeing they're seeking monetary fines against Google for this, and at their scale that's hardly a deterrent. It always works out to be a fraction of what they'd actually have to pay if they hadn't pulled whatever bullshit got them fined, and in the end won't impact them or their bottom line in the slightest. Until the fines are high enough to actually deter them, or they start pressing criminal charges…
> From what I'm seeing they're seeking monetary fines against Google for this
This is false. They are seeking a finding that Google destroyed evidence, and a hearing to assess sanctions, and an order for Google to make additional evidence available before the hearing. [0]
While fines might be part of the sanctions, a very common sanction for destruction of evidence is adverse inference jury instructions in the litigation the evidence was relevant to.
[0] actual motion: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit
#130Is the DoJ's argument that if you anticipate being sued in the future, you're not allowed to use private messaging at all?
The policy is if you are doing something illegal than you must keep all records of it. It is also that once your are sued you have to immediately stop all efforts to delete related conversations. I know my company often has to go in and turn off all automated deletes for a short time (a couple days?) while the lawyers figure out what keywords and people matter, then just keywords and people are locked down. Then more individual review of what remains to decide what is relevant, where if there is any doubt at all it is relevant and isn't deleted. Cases/investigations can last for years.