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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

#171

Post by nobodyandproud »

nostrademons wrote: post #137
gmd63 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

Ignorance of the law doesn’t protect individuals from being prosecuted.

This is excusing a two-tier system.

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

#172

Post by justinclift »

etothepii wrote: post #12
Supermancho wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Google didn't do it, it was those other individuals who defied the court order. Uh huh.

If true even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again. One assumes that if anyone had asked legal they would have been told they must switch off auto-delete. Lawyers aren't stupid they value their licence far more than their current job. I am highly doubtful there would be any written advice that said anything other than, if in doubt save.

s/day/year/ and that might be believable.

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

#173

Post by dylan604 »

coliveira wrote: post #112
fencepost wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again. Eh, utterly impractical but I still think there should be a way to "jail" corporations. Easy - "Your offices are closed for the duration of the sentence. Your systems are shut down for the duration. Automatic payments set up in advance can continue as long as there are funds in your bank accounts, but your staff will…

I believe the best penalty for a big company is really to be broken up. It doesn't penalize the people working on the company or its clients, since the business continue, but it does penalize the management and board of the company for their misbehavior.

Except if the broken up companies then start trimming staff because of the uncertainty of operating with corporate daddy any more. What was a stable company now becomes unstable and the ultimately, it is the employees that suffer

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

#174

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

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...

They should train Bard on their internal emails.

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

#175

Post by pbhjpbhj »

throwaway29303 wrote: post #89
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

Mr. Schmidt also didn't want to leave paper trail [0] to avoid being sued in another case as well. And somehow Mr. Schmidt considers himself to be a well behaved [1] person. "I am very well tested, I am very well behaved." -Eric Schmidt [0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper... [1] https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt

When he says "well behaved" he surely means in the computing sense of being predictable and having the range of his behaviours to be well known. Rather than the more common interpretation of "generally morally upstanding"?

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

#176

Post by admax88qqq »

justinclift wrote: post #168
sobkas wrote: post #157

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. 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? ;)

Literally every tech company does this.

Discovery was different when most communications were in person and company memos we're on paper. Even then companies shredded memos after a while, they're not worth the cost to store them.

Now with computers and everyone working via slack all day it's cheap to store everything everyone has said in your company and the laws around discovery haven't been updated so all of that content now has to be checked at the cost of the one being sued.

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

#177

Post by altair222 »

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…

Google will decide what people should and shouldnt do. Google will decide whether people deserve privacy in their lives for certain things or not. Language of the abusers.

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

#178

Post by spydum »

IncRnd wrote: post #165
amluto wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

like nearly every google workspace customer? ive been in two 30k+ orgs to use this.. its no different than teams?

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

#179

Post by bb88 »

wmeredith wrote: post #141
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.

Also, the CIA destroyed the torture video tapes to prevent embarrassment and further prosecutions of it's employees. So it kinda goes both ways.

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

#180

Post by cobaltoxide »

As an ex-Googler ... That auto-delete policy was extremely annoying.

And even if we turned it off, it only changed from a 24 hour deletion to something like 30 days. The chats certainly wouldn't be kept permanently.

Corporate data "retention" policies are entirely intended to avoid future legal "discovery." My understanding is that policies like Google's are considered "best practices". For example, my current employer deletes Slack messages after 90 days for the same reason. It is also extremely annoying.

My current employer even deletes Google Docs after something like 180 days unless they are put into special folders.

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