191–200 of 402 posts
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All phone conversations are recorded and kept for at least 7 years. This is in addition to all email and slack/IM messages.
I feel like it might be really awesome to have that complete firewall between work and life comms.
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I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that remote work doesn’t create a discoverable record if the conversation happens by unrecorded methods such as a video chat or phone call where the recording feature has not been enabled. The problem with Google Chat in this context is that even history-off Chats are kept for at least 24 hours before being destroyed (I’ve sometimes seen longer due to caching), so a record is…
>I admit I don’t know whether something like un-logged IRC would be allowed, but at the very least, any IRC clients that do log the history even for the purpose of displaying it locally after a crash and restart would themselves create a discoverable record subject to any applicable preservation obligation. This logic gets absurd when you push it to the limits. For instance, any sort of VOIP call would imply deletion…
Judges won’t push the logic to its limits. They’ll look for a reasonable line, and give an annoyed look to people who go off on a technical “well actually VOIP packets are briefly in memory and then deleted, so it’s the same thing”.
Judges recognize that arguments that are reasonable and logical in some domains aren’t perfectly generalizable to all cases. They’ll just (if it’s relevant to the case) make a ruling on whether transistory packets count as recording, and create a litigation hold (they’d almost certainly decide it doesn’t) and move on with their lives.
I moved from an HFT firm to Google. The attitude difference with respect to document holds was hilarious. At the HFT firm, the attitude was, "we're constantly being sued (by the SEC and others), so we treat all of our records like they're under litigation holds, just in case the SEC claims they wanted them, even the off-topic slack channels." At Google, the attitude was, "we're constantly getting sued, so we treat al…
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"The attitude difference with respect to document holds was hilarious." megcampbell@google.com: "it needs to be history off" https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... schramm@google.com: "should we have history off for this?" https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... margaretlam@google.com: "Hi Tim, if OK, can I ask you to turn history off :)" https://ia802501.us.archive.or…
Wow, that's not just "hey let's be careful", it's "hey, screw all that legal hold stuff, lol!" What kind of legal guidance were these people getting? When I worked at a big corp, we had regular meetings with legal that were reminders of how to treat sensitive subjects and it was taken very seriously.
The internal legal guidance they've been getting for this case is likely exactly the same as their internal legal guidance for everything else.
eg "completely full of shit" that they're complying with things
Seems like a bad internal culture, maybe stemming from their weird self belief and exceptionalism because "we're smarter than everyone else"?
Either way, when Google claims things like "We're fully compliant with GDPR, or [other legislation/requirements here]", the documented examples above is why many people don't believe them in the slightest.
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I think its rather disingenuous or modest for tech to fall back on "whats the worst that can happen, maybe you lose some pictures from the cloud" as a defense for such a light touch. There's many areas in which tech competes directly with, or has attempted to build shadow parallel systems to other more regulated industries - payments, exchanges, various medical plays, media, etc.
all of those "disruptors" just makes me cringe every time i hear it now. there have been so many bad actors. paypal still seizing accounts because some automated thing made a decision that can't be shared as to why. seems like Stripe as been in the news for similar topics. then you get the ones like Uber just flagrantly doing shady things to get that disruption. now, when i hear someone say disrupt, i immediately ass…
This is.. not new at all. We were talking about Uber doing that about a decade ago lol.
At Google in 2006, the SVP of Engineering was presenting to the entire engineering org during an all hands meeting. A question came up as regards retaining emails related to a pending lawsuit. He told everybody: "Do NOT delete any emails. . Let me say that again to make sure everyone has understood me correctly: do NOT delete any emails!" The way it was said, the chuckle, and the way it was repeated with the extra em…
Where are you getting this from? Is this from the complaint? Or a personal anecdote? I worked there in 2006. The SVP of Eng was Alan Eustace. He's a jolly guy, he chuckles a lot. I don't remember this specific exchange but I can hear his chuckle in my head. Knowing him, the chuckle would almost certainly be laughing at what an obviously terrible idea it would be to delete the emails. Alan Eustace certainly would not…
Unrelatedly, I would not have believed you at the time if you told me that the then CEO had entered into an illegal mutual non-solicit agreement with Apple (and Intel, Adobe, and others), suppressing employee pay by agreeing not to recruit or hire each other's workers. History and a successful class action lawsuit revealed a different story.
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all of those "disruptors" just makes me cringe every time i hear it now. there have been so many bad actors. paypal still seizing accounts because some automated thing made a decision that can't be shared as to why. seems like Stripe as been in the news for similar topics. then you get the ones like Uber just flagrantly doing shady things to get that disruption. now, when i hear someone say disrupt, i immediately ass…
Paypal and Stripe's actions like seizing accounts automatically is probably more due to complying to industry rules rather than avoiding them. The "shady" things are what any bank would have to do, not just the techs.
Getting a paypal/google/whatever account flagged is basically the death of that account.
I moved from an HFT firm to Google. The attitude difference with respect to document holds was hilarious. At the HFT firm, the attitude was, "we're constantly being sued (by the SEC and others), so we treat all of our records like they're under litigation holds, just in case the SEC claims they wanted them, even the off-topic slack channels." At Google, the attitude was, "we're constantly getting sued, so we treat al…
Yeah, FAANG gang has no idea the level of surveillance and record keeping that bank/fund/wall st tech is under. I worked at one shop that if you said "call my cell" in a slack to someone, you'd get a call from compliance within days ask to explain why you did this, what the conversation was about, why it wasn't on a work phone.. and to never, ever, ever do it again... because you know we are watching, so we will find…
The US can't regulate the monopolies adequately. The east doesn't have the same problem to that degree but in a way their solution is probably worse. Depending on who you ask, much worse. We need a new paradigm for government. It needs to be nuanced, sophisticated, balanced and yet holistic, and integrate well with technology. Or maybe due to the incompetence of current governments, the technology itself with take ov…
When the Sherman Antitrust Act was originally passed in the 1890s, the American judicial system systematically refused to apply it to business trusts. They didn't strike them down as unconstitutional, of course - they just argued that, oh no, poor old Congress doesn't know what words mean, they really meant to ban labor unions and not the monopolistic businesses they were trying to combat. This continued through several decades and multiple follow-up bills explicitly prohibiting courts from doing this (they did it anyway).
For a few decades this practice stopped; mostly because the monopolists drove the world economy off the Marianas trench and there was a social democrat in the White House willing to do unspeakably authoritarian shit to the courts[0]. Also, WWII happened.
This, however, was just a diversion from the mean. In 1980s a bunch of federal judges decided to pull a similar stunt, reinterpreting antitrust law not as a prohibition against economic concentration but merely one against raising prices. The resulting "consumer welfare" standard wound up getting adopted by the executive branch[1] and since then we don't regulate monopolies at all.
Because here's the thing: monopolies don't raise prices. They lower them.[2]
The east has worse monopoly problems than we currently do. China doesn't have a solution to monopoly, it is the monopoly. Every major Chinese corporation is extremely exploitative of their workers, and has major ties to the government and Chinese Communist Party. Chinese law has a broken welfare system, no internal freedom of movement, and bans labor unions. South Korea is democratically run[3] but the chaebols are so large that they form their own voting blocs. 11% of the country's labor force is employed by Samsung. Japan had similar problems - after Matthew Perry forced open their borders, they saw America's monopolists and, not wanting to be eaten by them, formed their own. The zaibatsu reigned until the end of WWII, where America, having now forced Japan's unconditional surrender at the threat of nuclear annihilation, used their position as Japan's occupiers to hack the companies in question up into little pieces.
The solution to monopoly is to destroy the monopoly. No more and no less. It's not a problem of not understanding the new technology. The problem is that monopolists tend to be several steps ahead of you; deposing them requires sustained focus and an economically enfranchised democracy. In the case of the Internet, many very well-meaning and intelligent hacker types were pushing for keeping the Internet unregulated, because they were worried about social conservatives censoring us in the name of the moral panic of the day, or the RIAA censoring us in the name of music still being a saleable commodity. This was co-opted by the monopolists to carve out vast swaths of the Internet for themselves.
The EU didn't make this same mistake and actually enforced their antitrust laws on US tech companies. Problem is, they could only really fine Google, not break them up, so for a good decade tech enthusiasts had this idea in their heads that this was just a revenue generating exercise for the EU. The amount of consumer good-will Google and Apple had (and still has), especially in the tech space, was (and is) downright obscene.
[0] If that wasn't bad enough for the monopolists, there were a bunch of capital-f Fascists trying to seize power as well. The monopolists considered front-running the Fascists and having Smedley Butler assassinate FDR and crown himself dictator, but fortunately for us he had a change of heart and defected.
[1] Thanks, Reagan.
[2] When a large portion of goods are made by a handful of companies, those companies have significant negotiating leverage and economies of scale. Competitive free markets are actually more inefficient because you're paying a redundancy and freedom premium.
[3] Only after 1987. South Korea used to be run by a military dictatorship.
Pardon my ignorance, but why isn't Pichai allowed to have chat conversations that don't record history? Was there a case against Google already that bans this or something? And couldn't this just be circumvented by having an in-person meeting?
> couldn't this just be circumvented by having an in-person meeting? here I present you a case for the perils of remote work