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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

#131

Post by crazygringo »

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.

And even e-mail has the problem when it's deleted after two years according to retention policy.

You have a contact you remember who emailed you three years about a thing... you'll never find them again.

I was genuinely shocked to discover how often I needed an email from over two years ago to check on something or someone. Oh well.

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

#132

Post by 1letterunixname »

amluto wrote: post #103
1letterunixname wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

If we used it, we would never allow OTR.

Heck, we don't even allow chats in third party apps like Zoom.

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

#133

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Funny how Google can ignore the privacy of internet users' conversations but when it comes to their employees' conversations, Google does not want to share those with the Government. According to the Government's memo supporting sanctions, Google is deleting conversations within 24h despite being under litigation holds.

https://ia902501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22...

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appearing on CNBC once said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

If Google is not doing anything wrong, then why not give the Government what it is are asking for and let justice prevail.

Google collects and surveils internet users' conversations on a mass scale without a subpoena, for whatever purpose(s) it chooses, for profit. To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare, that's apparently acceptable. However when the Government subpoenas Google for Google's conversations, for the sole purpose of determining whether Google is complying with the law, Google resists.

Personal data mining on billions of people. No problem. Monitoring employees to catch leakers and whistleblowers. Can do. Saving employee chats to satisty document requests from the Government. Too time-consuming and burdensome!

There is perhaps no company in the world better equipped to comb through peoples' conversations.

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

#134

Post by masterof0 »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #63
paxys wrote: post #10

Terrible. Slaps on the wrist for everyone. Maybe a $5M fine to really teach them a lesson.

Spoliation is a crime https://lewisbrisbois.com/newsroom/legal-alerts/15-month-pri...

So do you think that Sundar will go to jail? please

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

#136

Post by bredren »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #133

Funny how Google can ignore the privacy of internet users' conversations but when it comes to their employees' conversations, Google does not want to share those with the Government. According to the Government's memo supporting sanctions, Google is deleting conversations within 24h despite being under litigation holds. https://ia902501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt app…

In Schmidt’s first tv interview on Bitcoin he also said concern over unchecked criminality was overblown.

He suggested that criminals make enough opsec mistakes that would be recorded that the government need not be worried.

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

#137

Post by nostrademons »

gmd63 wrote: post #92
freejazz wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

It's very difficult to do this without introducing ThoughtCrime. The set of things that you could potentially have thought about doing is infinite. There's almost inevitably something in hindsight that you could have done to get the results that the prosecutor/plaintiff desired. The problem is that ordinary people without the benefit of hindsight fail to notice these options all the time, for all sorts of mundane reasons. If you criminalize negligence you're going to sweep an awful lot of innocent people up in your dragnet.

Strategic stupidity is indistinguishable, from the outside, from actual stupidity. I'd bet the latter is significantly more common. Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

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

#138

Post by dragonwriter »

voakbasda wrote: post #95
theptip wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just tech; we're seeing this pressure in finance too. Matt Levine joked about this recently: > It really is wild that the SEC’s official position is now that it is illegal to “use unofficial communications to do things like cut deals, win clients or make trades.” “Conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels”! Imagine if that was really the rule! You can’t have lunch with a cl…

I'd be completely in favor of this... if first the politicians, lawmakers, and bureaucrats were all held to the same standard.

The combination of open records and open meetings laws in many state governments largely do hold state and local officials to rules like this.

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

#139

Post by raldi »

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.

I was working there when this happened, and I definitely remember thinking, "Well, no point in writing a detailed email full of information that will be useful in the future, because in 30 days it'll be gone anyway."

Even more frustrating was finding myself in a situation where I remembered an old email that would be enormously helpful, either because of the information in it, or because I could reuse the bulk of something I had invested a lot of effort into writing, and knowing that this work was gone forever.

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

#140

Post by jvolkman »

bogwog wrote: post #59
klyrs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> The updated version of Google’s code of conduct still retains one reference to the company’s unofficial motto—the final line of the document is still: “And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”
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