261–270 of 341 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that doesn't male either right.
My point is that I have a hard time see the Justice Department bring charges for destroying evidence when they didn't do a darn thing against those that did do evil things under the name of the US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Soon: It was The AI. We can’t do anything, since we can’t predict how it behaves. Turns out this time it wanted to protect Google, but ya never know.
Suddenly the EU’s ruling about AI: “you’ve got to be able to describe how it behaves” becomes a lot more powerful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, the CIA destroyed the torture video tapes to prevent embarrassment and further prosecutions of it's employees. So it kinda goes both ways.
You are demonstrating scary level of Moral Confusion. CIA operates in the National interest, at least hypothetically. Google can operate against national interest to make money, or 'whoever pays most' interest. The people of USA have granted CIA privileges of secrecy and legal protections explicitly to do ShadyShit. No-one ever gave Google permission to do ShadyShit. CIA employees go through background checks, US Gov…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I just went to a meeting where my presence meant there could be no privileged communication even though the lawyer's client was also my client and they had requested my attendance.
Right. From the Ars article it seemed that it was Google employees looping in Google lawyers while communicating with each other, not Google employees looping in the lawyers while also talking with third parties. So more like if I and a colleague both go to legal to hold a conversation just to gain the benefit of their presence to call it privileged. But if the lawyer is just sitting there working through a book of s…
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.
From the article, "The DOJ said in a court filing Thursday that Google trained employees on the benefits of using “off the record chats." They were trying to avoid liability not transfer it.
Send people to prison and/or fine the hell out of these corporations.
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…
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.
This is the corporate response to the modern "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" legal system.
Everybody is always breaking the law, often because following it is impossible (e.g. different laws require mutually incompatible actions), but mostly because nobody knows all the laws and people regularly break them unintentionally.
Corporate lawyers have no ability to change this since it would require making the laws clear and consistent and simple enough for people to understand, so instead they try to make it harder for anyone to find which laws their clients broke.
Then we have to try not to cheer when the victim is somebody we don't like.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the blacklists of google leak[1], I am betting they don't want a congressional subpoena to find out the boatloads of ridiculously politicized censorship they do either. [1] https://www.zachvorhies.com/blacklists/
What do you think about the assertion that these blacklists are for ads? From the linked internal discussion on the shooting: "changes to ad serving and changes to search ranking are done completely independently, and by different teams". Isn't it a good idea not to serve ads on sites that are discussing a recent national trauma? Or at the very least not really related to politics?
I say no, because that devalues truthful reporting on real and important events, in favour of safe pablum that will pass the censors. Real news is important, but who is paying for news if it's not funded by ads?
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 kind of weird that we've turned formerly ephemeral things into "evidence" just because they could optionally be stored.
If it was a few decades ago, the kind of things happening in these chats would have happened in person or on the telephone with nobody necessarily recording it. Whether to store them or for how long is an arbitrary choice.
You probably have your phone with you all the time. It has a microphone in it. Is not recording your every conversation "destruction of evidence"? What if the microphone is always on (because it's listening for voice commands) so the audio is stored temporarily in memory before being deleted?
The precedents cases like this set don't just apply to huge corporations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 initiato…