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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

#211

Post by MSFT_Edging »

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.

Power is basically dictated by the ability to make an exception to the rule.

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

#212

Post by hedora »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #209
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…

> To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare You are probably using the wrong expression. Corporate Welfare means Welfare for Corporations. So it's when a government bestows money grants, tax breaks, or other special favourable treatment for corporations. It is nothing to do with employees, not paying excessive salaries, or keeping unproductive ones around. It does not imply that main benefic…

Google’s the primary beneficiary of the DMCA, and also the US’s criminally lax privacy laws.

Sounds like corporate welfare to me.

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

#213

Post by RajT88 »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #211
wmeredith wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Power is basically dictated by the ability to make an exception to the rule.

Power makes it easy to do the wrong thing, and harder to do the right thing.

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

#214

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Okay, so we could dispose with a whole raft of individual crimes:

No-one should ever be prosecuted for theft, because Theft requires malice, I thought I was taking abandoned goods! No-one should be prosecuted for fraud, I just accidentally omitted the fact that the item I am selling does not work?

When are you going to wise up to the fact that, if you do the same things Google does, you will be convicted immediately.

The corporate structure allows them to avoid liability and deliberately create vagueness as to who's fault it is. This is 100% intentional. And they've done nothing to deserve this privilege.

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

#215

Post by avianlyric »

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…

> When are regulators and enforcers going to wise up to this "clever" game of disguising malicious behavior as negligence?

Thankfully in finance many of them already have. In the UK there a number of “Prescribed Responsibility” roles which financial organisations are required to fill with a single individual. That individual is required to be competent, knowledgeable and aware of any company actions that fall within their area of responsibility. It’s a criminal offence for them to fail on any of those three points, and also criminal for a financial organisation to appoint someone who couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet those three points. The organisation is also required to make sure those roles are only held by senior executives with real decision making power.

As a consequence there is no space for wilful ignorance, or enacting policies to try and distribute decision making. Attempting those, and then having your company later found to be breaking the law, would result in personal criminal liability for the executive involved.

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

#216

Post by ocdtrekkie »

akira2501 wrote: post #163
crazygringo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 firs…

If you make a personal copy it's not in the email system, and they can reasonably say they couldn't find it, since they aren't going to search everyone's desktops for errant emails.

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

#217

Post by hedora »

What’s the penalty for this? The article says “sanction”, but that probably doesn’t mean “bar domestic companies and the US government from doing business with them”.

Presumably, the punishment has to be worse than what would happen if the documents proved all of the DOJ’s allegations, or there would be no incentive to obey subpoenas. (Note that, while unrealistically harsh, such a policy is probably still too lax: Deleting the documents might be the best course of action, assuming they contain shady shit the DOJ hadn’t thought of. Personal jail time for everyone above the responsible party in the org chart might make sense, especially if it included the board of directors.)

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

#218

Post by eep_social »

akira2501 wrote: post #163
crazygringo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 firs…

I understood that the goal is to reduce keyword hits during discovery therefore making the action active rather than passive is a favorable balance of concerns.

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

#219

Post by Supermancho »

czx4f4bd wrote: post #58
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.

That's not what that means. That's a pre-emptive argument in case Google tries to say that individual employees were responsible for preserving evidence. > Google may argue that it relied on individual custodians to manually preserve history-off chats. But that argument should be rejected for two reasons. > First, it is and was Google’s obligation to suspend auto-deletion policies; it is no defense to suggest that in…

>>> 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.

> That's not what that means.

It's exactly what I meant. In context, the meaning of the text is incidental. I was obviously pointing out a common tactic that companies employ.

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

#220

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ROTMetro wrote: post #57
ss108 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter. "Every day employees" are not the ones who needed to do this.

They can be if the policy was that individual employees needed to self enforce retention on XYZ topics and employees were provided training to that effect. The Feds can not say a company must retain all records going forward, only that it make reasonable effort to retain relevant records and training employees to place items going forward in some sort of vault historically qualifies, especially when this training/ret…

> Feds don't get to just blow that budget up because 'they have concerns' or else they could use 'concerns' as a weapon to destroy companies.

Hello government, please leave my factory. Stop collecting evidence of the recent lethal safety incident, we need to mop up the blood and continue production. Yes, I know I am suspected of breaching the laws on workplace safety, but otherwise we'll blow the budget!

Hello government, I am sorry to say you won't be getting any of those emails you've subpoenaed that incriminate me, I had to delete them to save $5 on my outlook subscribtion, it was blowing my budget.

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