Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

ia601707.us.archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 402 posts

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#181

Post by patmcc »

hermitdev wrote: post #142
jmole wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who in particular would you punish? All this behavior is required by company policy, presumably set by Google's legal department: "Google employees are instructed that chatting “‘off the record’” is “[b]etter than sending . . . email” specifically because Google destroys off-the-record Chats every 24 hours, whereas it retains emails to produce in litigation".

All of the parties involved need to be sanctioned. The employees following the bad instruction and the lawyers issuing the instruction. Violating a court order at the instruction of your employer's lawyer doesn't give you a free pass. Remember: they are the company's lawyer, not the employees'. But, the lawyers definitely need to be hit and hard. Not sure if disbarring is an option here, but should be on the tablem

>>Violating a court order at the instruction of your employer's lawyer doesn't give you a free pass.

What was the specific court order? I see it generally referenced in the brief but don't know the whole story. Were employees violating it here?

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#182

Post by bjornsing »

usr1106 wrote: post #168

I don't think their dirty tricks and legal consequences are the main point here. The question is poorly political: Do we want a functioning market economy or not? I take only the mobile phone operating system. We have a high end walled garden segment. By its price point it will always have limited market share. And we have a all-the-rest market segment. Competition between these market segments exists but it is by na…

> The monopoly is unprecedented in history, so the solution needs to be so, too.

What makes you think the Android monopoly is any worse than the Windows monopoly of the 90ties?

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#183

Post by justinclift »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #157
pclmulqdq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a 100-person company full of T-shirt wearers, ~4 random men walking around the trading floor in the middle of the day (a big no-no for any sort of guest) in suits is strange.

When I was in a bank we were asked to dress up in times when BaFin (German SEC) was expected in the campus.

That probably happened the first dozen or so times, until staff got over it. ;)

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#184

Post by ncallaway »

glerk wrote: post #69
rawgabbit wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lawyer. When a legal hold is issued, the company is instructed not to destroy potential evidence related to the case. They don’t have to perform additional recordings and minutes. But they exist, they can’t destroy it.

Who gets to decide what is "potential evidence"? If we're going to play language games, turning the chat history off doesn't really destroy anything, just prevents the paper trail from being created.

Turning chat history off typically doesn’t stop it from being recorded at all, but rather auto deletes messages after a short period.

If messages are being deleted 1 day after being sent, despite being subject to a litigation hold, that’s… going to often make judges mad.

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#185

Post by ncallaway »

glerk wrote: post #176
iudqnolq wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who gets to decide what is "potential evidence"? You have an obligation to proactively figure that out yourself. There is then oversight by the court. > If we're going to play language games Judges don't play that sort of language games > turning the chat history off doesn't really destroy anything What Google called off the record chats were 24 hour history chats. So the history was deleted after 24 hours, when it…

> What Google called off the record chats were 24 hour history chats. Ah, I missed that part, that's a very compelling argument. I disagree these are not language games though. The way the chat application was kept from preserving history is an implementation detail that doesn't reflect the action the user of the chat performed in the UI. It sounds like the truth is whatever a human judge can be convinced into decidi…

> It sounds like the truth is whatever a human judge can be convinced into deciding is true.

I mean, that’s literally the judges job. It’s why they are called a judge. They make a judgement as to where the truth lies, and where the law lies (except for issues that are delegated to a jury, in which case the jury is responsible for determining the factual record).

But, yes, judges make judgements and a lot of the “well, technically” semantic games that people play will be met with an annoyed scowl and a negative opinion (but, critically not all semantic games; there are some semantic differences that are of critical importance to a judge)

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#186

Post by Lazare »

This is....amazing. As I understand it:

Chats at google by default have 24 hours of chat history. (That is, after 24 hours, the chat history is delelted.) You can opt in to having 30 days of chat history instead. And when under a legal hold, Google continues to delete chats in the 24 hour history mode, but will not delete chats in the 30 day history mode.

That is, Google's theory here seems to be that if you have a policy to destroy certain letters and memos 24 hours after receiving or creating them, then you don't need to stop doing that and preserve them even if under a court ordered legal hold. But if your policy is to destroy certain documents 30 days after creating them, then you must stop deleting them and retain them if ordered by a court.

Which is....a.....theory!

I think it's fine for Google to have a policy to delete chats by default after 24 hours, and...probably fine for some executives to strongly prefer to use the 24 hour history mode by default just in case they get sued sometime in the next 30 days. What I don't understand is what argument exists for why you can delete relevant records after you're under a legal hold.

I guess there's a little complexity here in that Google seems to have called (and thought of) these chats as being off the record - that is, they weren't chats with recordings deleted automatically after 24 hours, they were chats that had no recordings and just happened to have chat history that stuck around for 24 hours. From a technical point of view, that's nonsense; the chat history is absolutely a recording, and slapping a label on top saying "off the record" doesn't change that. But eh, maybe it'll be more convincing to the judge.

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#187

Post by ocdtrekkie »

scarface74 wrote: post #164
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google operates exactly like a criminal organization would. It's that simple, and we should talk about it in that way, because that is what it is. A huge portion of their business is effectively racketeering, and we should be putting Larry, Sergey, and Sundar in prison. RICO provides some tools to effectively bring in the heads of the organization based on the actions of people under their employ. "Nice website you g…

I’m far from a Google fan and find most of the products tacky - including Google search without an ad blocker. But I wouldn’t even go that far.

I think we are far too afraid of upsetting tech employees to admit that it's exactly what it is. They apply somewhere near a double-digit-percentage tax to most businesses globally. They are under investigation for illegal practices in nearly every jurisdiction that has laws against certain business practices, and now their CEO has literally been caught specifically requesting to take business conversations off the record so they can't be used as evidence against them in a court of law. It's been a few years since people talked about it, but how much money were they hiding offshore in a island nation bank account again?

Like... I'm hard pressed to find a scenario where Google has not appeared to be a bunch of outright gangsters.

If we could put executives from Volkswagen in prison for cooking the books on some environmental regulations, shuttering Google and arresting the entire C-suite should be way more obvious.

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#188

Post by sitkack »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #160
shadowgovt wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically, we could base it on revenue.

So if we take the top 10 companies by revenue, we get Apple, Google, Amazon, but also Walmart, CVS Health, UnitedHealth Group, Exon Mobil, Berkshire, McKesson, AmerisourceBergen. It still feels pretty random to me.

It is literally a scalar with an easy comparison operator. These companies have too much power just by their size. If we won't make them smaller and not "too big to fail" we should make them operate better.

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#189

Post by bboygravity »

justinclift wrote: post #183
johannes1234321 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in a bank we were asked to dress up in times when BaFin (German SEC) was expected in the campus.

That probably happened the first dozen or so times, until staff got over it. ;)

Not if it was Deutsche: they actually have things to hide and an appearance to keep up.

Re: Google CEO: “can we change the setting of this group to history-off” [pdf]

#190

Post by sitkack »

scarface74 wrote: post #159
shadowgovt wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hypothetically, we could base it on revenue.

You think it’s a good idea to give the government more surveillance power?

Over corporations, yes please!
Post reply on HN