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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

#141

Post by wmeredith »

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…

"Rules for thee, but not for me" may actually be the oldest trick in the book. Google's hypocrisy here is disappointing, but not surprising in the least.

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

#142

Post by KMag »

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.

Eventually, Big Brother turns on everyone.

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

#143

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

Zircom wrote: post #126
dragonwriter wrote: post #96

Earlier 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…

> 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

An oft-repeated argument, but usually not backed by any evidence or math.

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

#144

Post by voakbasda »

dragonwriter wrote: post #138
voakbasda wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but the practical reality parallels the regulations mentioned above: the rules are not being enforced fully, and there do not appear to be enough real-world consequences to prevent individuals from breaking them.

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

#145

Post by DenisM »

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.

I presume you meant a refcount, not a Boolean?

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

#146

Post by gopher_space »

Jtsummers wrote: post #75
shadowgovt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is manufactured privilege?

Communications with your lawyer are privileged. Communications with other people are not (necessarily) privileged. By looping in the lawyer it creates a pretext (that probably won't hold up) for claiming it is privileged communication.

Interesting. I just went to a meeting where my presence meant there could be no privileged communication even though the lawyer's client was also my client and they had requested my attendance.

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

#147

Post by spondyl »

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…

> 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."

It's always funny when Eric Schmidt says stuff like that.

I've shared it before but I'll inline this evergreen quote from a book called In The Plex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27479152

> One day Denise Griffin got a call from Eric Schmidt’s assistant. “There’s this information about Eric in the indexes,” she told Griffin. “And we want it out.” In Griffin’s recollection, it dealt with donor information from a political campaign, exactly the type of public information that Google dedicated itself to making accessible. Griffin explained that it wasn’t Google policy to take things like that out of the index just because people didn’t want it there. Principles always make sense until it’s personal,” she says.

> Then in July 2005, a CNET reporter used Schmidt as an example of how much personal information Google search could expose. Though she used only information that anyone would see if they typed Schmidt’s name into his company’s search box, Schmidt was so furious that he blackballed the news organization for a year.

> “My personal view is that private information that is really private, you should be able to delete from history,” Schmidt once said. But that wasn’t Google’s policy...

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

#148

Post by Jtsummers »

gopher_space wrote: post #146
Jtsummers wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communications with your lawyer are privileged. Communications with other people are not (necessarily) privileged. By looping in the lawyer it creates a pretext (that probably won't hold up) for claiming it is privileged communication.

Interesting. I just went to a meeting where my presence meant there could be no privileged communication even though the lawyer's client was also my client and they had requested my attendance.

Right. From the Ars article it seemed that it was Google employees looping in Google lawyers while communicating with each other, not Google employees looping in the lawyers while also talking with third parties. So more like if I and a colleague both go to legal to hold a conversation just to gain the benefit of their presence to call it privileged. But if the lawyer is just sitting there working through a book of sudoku puzzles, then it's probably not really a valid claim of privilege.

From the Ars article:

> In 2016, Google instructed employees to create artificial indicia of privilege for all written communications related to revenue-share agreements and Mobile Application Distribution Agreements (MADAs), the exclusionary agreements at the heart of this action. Google reiterated those instructions after the Department of Justice issued its first Civil Investigative Demand in the investigation preceding this case. The Court should, therefore, sanction Google for its deliberate and deceptive misuse of the attorney-client privilege and order the company to produce, unredacted, all emails between non-attorneys where included in-house counsel did not bother to reply, indicating that any request for legal advice was most likely a pretext.

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

#149

Post by wmeredith »

shadowgovt wrote: post #50
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

He catches a lot of shit for his phrasing, but Schmidt had a habit of saying true things in a way that maximized the odds they'd be received poorly. (In context, they were talking about the long-retention and implicit-digital-footprint effects on online services, and he was noting that the trends were only going to become "more observation" and "more retention" over time... At some point, it becomes much cheaper to j…

Schmidt doesn't get shit for saying true things. He gets shit for being a rich hypocritical asshole. At the time he was spouting his holier-than-thou bullshit, he was colluding with other high-tech firms (Apple, et al.) to suppress workers' salaries, and he was actively hiding the evidence of doing so. It came out in court anyway and Google was part of a half-billion dollar settlement over the matter.

Eric Schmidt is not some misunderstood truth-sayer. He's a crook and a hypocrite and the things he says are received poorly because he's an elitist who's made his $25,000,000,000 fortune punching down.

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

#150

Post by stingrae »

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…

It's because many kinds of lawsuits (not only the government's) can go into discovery and when you have 130k+ employees generating discoverable materials it becomes very costly to search and provide these for lawsuits. It's easier to set an auto-delete policy and attempt to avoid certain things from being available for it.

You aren't necessarily trying to hid conversations. You are trying to reduce the amount of content you have to search through during discovery.

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