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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

#161

Post by IncRnd »

pverghese wrote: post #159
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 w…

It's very much a thing. The question is whether Google in preparation for an upcoming court action decided to start throwing records away. People don't get away with that before a divorce, before selling a company, or in any other situation.

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

#162

Post by verisimi »

spondyl wrote: post #147
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 Schmid…

Great quotes.

Privacy for google, other corporations and the government is a one way street. You give it to them. There is no reciprocity. That's it. And that's how it's staying. The end.

This is how tyrants are able to talk the talk (but not the walk) and bark out moral high ground orders to those they rule, while doing whatever degenerate acts they like behind closed doors. That's what power is and does.

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

#163

Post by akira2501 »

crazygringo wrote: post #131
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.

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

Same problem. So, I asked the company IT staff, what is the recommended solution? The answer was "oh, just create a folder on your network drive, and drag-and-drop the .MSG files into there."

This answer was apparently vetted by the same company lawyers that came up with the 2 year retention policy in the first place. I don't have the courage to confirm this, but I really would like to ask them what the point of all this even is.

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

#164

Post by CatWChainsaw »

vorpalhex wrote: post #21
CatWChainsaw wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised you're getting downvoted given the amount of snark in other comments. Or is the directness the part we're not supposed to be saying out loud?

[flagged]

I suppose it never occurred to you that the "issue" could be an example of a battle in a culture war.

The culture here is capitalism. Capitalism is a worship of capital and its acquisition by any means. Including pushing for new fuels that give 25% of people cancer, or by breaking unions that are trying to prevent East Palestines, or by classifying people as "independent contractors" to avoid paying for benefits, or by swallowing up competition, or by then attempting to thwart a costly antitrust lawsuit by "accidentally" losing evidence.

Google's culture was "don't be evil", and then capitalism happened (see above) and we get the parent remark: "the only evil to a capitalist is loss of capital"

Now what was it you were saying about a dress code?

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

#165

Post by IncRnd »

amluto wrote: post #114
donalhunt wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What major enterprise customer uses Google as a chat service?

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

#166

Post by andromeduck »

wpietri wrote: post #76
ROTMetro wrote: post #66

Earlier 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...

People can just voice/video call and write memos.

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

#167

Post by vkou »

omginternets wrote: post #34
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)

When does it not work, generally speaking?

When you're not asking for particular legal advice about a particular legal problem, CCing a lawyer doesn't result in your communication being protected by layer-client privilege.

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

#168

Post by justinclift »

sobkas wrote: post #157
stingrae wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Heh Heh Heh

If it's anything like their current search tech, then it's not really fit for purpose eh?

Maybe they should outsource this "it needs to work otherwise gov fines!" search piece to something more effective. Like maybe Yahoo? ;)

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

#169

Post by jeremyjh »

shadowgovt wrote: post #47
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 don't have a horse in this race (anymore), but in the abstract I would love if government aligned incentives so that it was more painful for companies to toss records that should have been retained than to retain records that are damaging to them in hindsight, which they were legally allowed at some point to toss. For precisely the reason you indicated.

Just let the plaintiff or prosecuter decide what evidence they would have liked to find and instruct the jury to assume it was found. This would never happen again anywhere.

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

#170

Post by iepathos »

lol this checks out, but justice department cannot assert that companies are suppose to keep all internet conversations indefinitely. No precedence for that so they are just blowing smoke here huffing and puffing because they have zero evidence and that must be the defendant's fault.
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