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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

#231

Post by ClumsyPilot »

asah wrote: post #99
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

except that the harmless written word is notoriously easy to quote out of context and otherwise use "against you" in court. At google's scale, it's virtually impossible to NOT have mountains of "incriminating" conversations. Also, it seems arbitrary that OTR chat should be recorded but hallway conversations and phonecalls are ok to delete...

> harmless written word is notoriously easy to quote out of context and otherwise use "against you" in court.

Do you believe lawyers and judges are unfamiliar with this issue?

Like their entire lives are spent reviewing documents, letters and email. They invented the concept of Disclosure before computers existed, so that Defence can rebut or put proper context to any argument that will be made by prosecution.

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

#233

Post by saagarjha »

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…

> Google collects and surveils internet users' conversations on a mass scale without a subpoena, for whatever purpose(s) it chooses, for profit. To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare, that's apparently acceptable.

There are 300 million people that live in the United States. Do you think they all agree with the country’s policies with regards to surveillance? How about pretty much any other country?

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

#234

Post by ClumsyPilot »

KMag wrote: post #142
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.

Eventually, Big Brother turns on everyone.

They created big brother. Creation turns on it's creator.

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

#235

Post by jessaustin »

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.

As Carl Schmitt wrote in 1922, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." Schmitt is somewhat out of favor, but his protege Leo Strauss basically created the times we now suffer.

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

#236

Post by saagarjha »

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…

No, this is what the legal team would say when people asked them why they instituted a short retention policy and they didn’t want to say “we keep having crimes show up when people do discovery against us”. This would also result in an attempt to reduce the amount of content needed to search through during discovery.

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

#237

Post by anticensor »

shadowgovt wrote: post #35
Name_Chawps wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is particularly funny because one way Google scams people to get them to buy more storage space is by moving deleted drive/Gmail items to the Drive Trash instead of deleting them. So when you try to clear space by deleting emails etc., it doesn't seem to help. Furthermore, even if you clear your Trash, it can take hours to take effect (for Some Reason), making it seem like you need to just give up and buy more s…

Apples to oranges. (... and the reason Google does Drive Trash is that destroying user data is a much worse user experience than letting the delete be lazy, even when the user has given signal they want the data destroyed. There's decades of UX research to back that assertion; it's why "trash cans" were created in the first place as a UI abstraction. Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disr…

> Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disrupt your career by deleting some critical info, that's on you.

They should consistently apply the deletion policy, in fact, they should go even further and do what governments do to their own sensitive information: keep a deletion log that stores item IDs, authors and content types (but not the contents) that had been deleted along with the initiator and the date of deletion and the IP address of the machine that received the deletion. Something at Google's scale deserves ğovernment-level scrutiny.

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

#238

Post by dragonwriter »

asah wrote: post #99
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

except that the harmless written word is notoriously easy to quote out of context and otherwise use "against you" in court. At google's scale, it's virtually impossible to NOT have mountains of "incriminating" conversations. Also, it seems arbitrary that OTR chat should be recorded but hallway conversations and phonecalls are ok to delete...

> Also, it seems arbitrary that OTR chat should be recorded but hallway conversations and phonecalls are ok to delete…

If you regularly create records of conversations and phone calls, evidence preservation rules apply to those records as well; you cannot delete them, either.

The fact that no records are usually made in the first place and that the only evidence of the content of such conversations is witness testimony not records means that evidence preservations laws don’t apply (but if you tamper with the witnesses, that is a fairly serious offense.)

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

#239

Post by ClumsyPilot »

voakbasda wrote: post #144
dragonwriter wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there specific government meeting or record you have in mind, that legally should have been public, but isn't?

Generally we have enough proof of politicians doing/saying deplorable things. We don't have enough voters punishing their politicians for misbehaviour.

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

#240

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Just for fun, below is taken verbatim from Google's Memo in Support of its Motion to Transfer Venue filed earlier this week in the latest antitrust case in the Eastern District of Virginia. After reading, take the quiz.

Google's lawyers first began anticipating litigation in

(a) 2020

(b) 2021

(c) 2022

(d) 2023

(e) none of the above.

"In September 2019, the attorneys general of forty-eight States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico announced an investigation into Googles ad tech business, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.1 At the same time, the DOJ opened its own antitrust investigation into Googles ad tech business.2 In October 2019, the DOJ issued a Civil Investigative Demand to Google calling for production of documents relating to Googles ad tech business, along with a host of other topics. These two investigations of the same Google ad tech business proceeded in parallel. The DOJ and Texas both made expansive requests for production of documents concerning Googles ad tech."

1 See Harper Neidig, 50 attorneys general launch antitrust investigation into Google, The Hill (Sept. 9, 2019),

    https://thehill.com/policy/technology/460550-states-launch-antitrustinvestigation-into-google/.
2 Sara Forden & David McLaughlin, DOJ Scrutinizes Google Advertising, Search in Antitrust Probe, Bloomberg Law (Aug. 8, 2019),

    https://www.bloomberglaw.com/bloomberglawnews/antitrust/XF6V15CS000000.
Source: https://ia601604.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.vaed.5...
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