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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

#151

Post by avalys »

water-your-self wrote: post #101
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

The point is that we use written communication a lot more in a modern (especially remote) office than we did in 1950, and for a much broader range of purposes and interactions than when the regulations requiring records retention were written.

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

#152

Post by burna_aws_acct »

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…

QQ: Was Google the only corporation required to suspend its auto-delete practices? Thanks!

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

#153

Post by avalys »

cldellow wrote: post #108
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 t…

> 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.

There are still interoffice memos in a modern office - they're called emails. But in 1950, if you wanted to just ask a quick question of your colleague Joe, you'd walk over to his office and ask him verbally. Regulators understood that these sorts of interaction happen all the time, are a natural part of business, and didn't try to require that records of these be documented or retained.

Today, if you want to ask a quick question of your colleague Joe (who might be in a different state), you just send him a message on Slack. And the same regulations originally written for interoffice memos in the 1950s require that your Slack messages be retained. The same regulations now cover a much broader range of types of communication and business interactions than they were ever intended to.

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

#154

Post by burna_aws_acct »

shadowgovt wrote: post #5
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…

It sounds like there were disagreements between Google's lawyers and the DOJ lawyers on the scope of the hold and what constitutes "reasonable."

i.e., Google lawyers found a loophole, and through it all employee chats were funneled.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

stingrae wrote: post #150
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 cont…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by gopher_space »

1letterunixname wrote: post #115
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,…

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 th…

Were you with your company when they became large enough to worry about legal holds? If so, was there a conversation about the transition you were privy to?

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

#157

Post by sobkas »

stingrae wrote: post #150
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 cont…

> 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.

If only they have technology that would help them doing such searches...

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

#158

Post by jefftk »

lesuorac wrote: post #90
jefftk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> always CC a lawyer and ask a question People would add lawyers like this, but (a) it wasn't something the trainings said to do, (b) the lawyers hated it, and (c) it doesn't work. (I used to work at Google, speaking only for myself)

DOJ alleges that a) is factual [1]. Perhaps not in your training but I've also never seen the slides in the pdf before. [1]: https://regmedia.co.uk/2022/03/22/memo_in_support-to-sanctio...

Good point; I was trying to talk about the standard company wide training on communication and privilege. Even though I worked in a relatively legally tricky area, the only training I got on privilege was company-level, and I was assuming (incorrectly apparently) that that was how it worked throughout the company.

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

#159

Post by pverghese »

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…

> 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.

How the hell is this a thing. I can understand if they did this post litigation being filed then it would be a problem.

How is a company supposed to anticipate when and where the government is going to file charges and keep records for them waiting.

If the government was concerned they should have filed the lawsuit sooner not in 2020

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

#160

Post by esotericimpl »

cldellow wrote: post #74
jonas21 wrote: post #32

Is the DoJ's argument that if you anticipate being sued in the future, you're not allowed to use private messaging at all?

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…

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