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

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

#291

Post by geysersam »

Longhanks wrote: post #287
seanhunter wrote: post #252

It's always really funny/amazing that seemingly smart people think that the legal system can be "hacked" by doing cheap stuff like deleting history. It's going to come out and it's going to look bad. In an actual case that I was involved in, the other party was an ex-lawyer and had a rigorous practise of not keeping records in case something bad was discovered. I on the other hand had (terrifyingly, in retrospect) me…

> It's always really funny/amazing that seemingly smart people think that the legal system can be "hacked" by doing cheap stuff like deleting history. It's always really funny/amazing that this exact process works flawlessly for EU politicians: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-von-der-leyen-cant-...

It's bizarre. Why would anyone delete their texts? It's such a transparent lie. Luckily the EU will soon go ahead with its chat control law, and the police will have access to all text and chat logs and will be able to prosecute any corruption in the parlament. At least that's what I think it's for.

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

#292

Post by flakeoil »

gorgoiler wrote: post #248
seraphsf wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today, we use instant messaging like we use voice conversation - especially for people who work remotely. Banning the use of ephemeral IM is sort of like saying “you need to record all of your discussions, no matter how trivial”. Levine’s article makes a great point: “It really is wild that the SEC’s official position is now that it is illegal to “use unofficial communications to do things like cut deals, win clients…

There’s a difference between avoiding discovery by tacitly moving conversations offline versus saying that you are doing so, in writing, in a discoverable channel, specifically to avoid discovery. The spirit of the latter crosses a line of showing deliberate contempt for the legal process. Doing it in writing seems just as ill advised as discussing sensitive information in writing.

It just shows how problematic all this "surveillance" (voluntary and involuntary) has become. And it will become even worse. We now have cameras/door cameras at almost every private home/apartment and every street corner. We have cars who record audio and image/video inside and outside of the vehicle. There is almost no real privacy anymore. Everything can be used against you.

Honestly, it's getting a bit insane I think.

If we cannot communicate digitally in private and we cannot communicate physically in close vicinity to a car or a building, the only place left is in a remote forest.

As we have seen with Tesla engineers having access to videos inside cars (how can this even be legal) and we saw the 21 year old who leaked the secret Pentagon data, it's not that there has to be a decision by lawyers or government agencies that the data has to be provided. Any devops or admin can access this kind of data and spread as they like.

And how come Tesla and the Pentagon has no precautions in place to stop this kind if abuse?

It's really quite crazy on many levels.

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

#293

Post by [deleted] »

rebuilder wrote: post #216
Lazare wrote: post #186

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 p…

One thing that comes to mind is that by the time a judge orders a hold, more than 24 hours will have elapsed since any chats that hold applies to. That is, if such a hold only applies to records created before the hold - do these orders apply to future records as well?

[deleted]

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

#294

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

rebuilder wrote: post #216
Lazare wrote: post #186

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 p…

One thing that comes to mind is that by the time a judge orders a hold, more than 24 hours will have elapsed since any chats that hold applies to. That is, if such a hold only applies to records created before the hold - do these orders apply to future records as well?

"... by the time a judge orders a hold..."

The obligation to preserve electronically stored information, e.g., the Google chats, starts upon reasonable anticipation of litigation, e.g., when the DoJ announces it has initiated an investigation of the company and dozens of state AGs publicly announce plans to sue. That can be before a suit is filed and before a judge is assigned. No court order needed.

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

#295

Post by oefrha »

wil421 wrote: post #158
steveBK123 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all just data, isn't it? Route it all through VoIP and record it there? Maybe theres some bank-compliance phone vendor that operates its own MVNO and does the recording for you? here's something like that - https://www.teleware.com/products/mobile-voice-recording/

No it’s not possible in the way or manner you described unless it’s an office phone. Banks aren’t creating a super secret MVNO to comply with regulations and the telcos aren’t cutting breaks for a bank or a 3rd party spy network. I’d imagine saving all employees cellphone calls for 7 years is a very expensive project.

You can encode voice with quite acceptable quality at 8kbps. (With recent advancements even 3kpbs is reasonably good.[1]) That’s 3.6MB per hour. Assuming an average of one hour per workday on the phone, a single employee generates less than 1GB a year. That’s peanuts. Even eight times that is lower than what I personally generate every day.

[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/02/lyra-new-very-low-bitrate-...

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

#296

Post by vjk800 »

jwalton wrote: post #230
glerk wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Who gets to decide what is "potential evidence"? Ultimately, the courts do, but if something is possibly related you’re supposed to preserve it. > turning the chat history off doesn't really destroy anything IANAL but courts tend to view all written conversions the same way. Turning off chat history is viewed the same as throwing away all the mail you receive, and both are very much frowned upon when the court has…

What is the chat happens in a software that didn't have chat history feature in the first place? I mean it's Google, surely they could cook up a separate internal chat tool just for this purpose. And if the chat history didn't exist in the first place, can the court order the company to switch to a chat software that has it? If not, how is it that different from toggling chat history on/off in a single software?

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

#297

Post by vjk800 »

polotics wrote: post #232
glerk wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I am getting the feeling you are being disingenuous: a record is a record, a records that gets deleted after 24 hours was still a record. This is a truth based only on the meaning of the word "record". The chat application was not kept from preserving history, it was designed to actively delete history after 24 hours If there is a court order to not delete history, then the application was designed to do the opposite…

Everything you do on a computer is recorded, at least ephemerally, in the computer memory. Does deleting stuff from the memory count as destroying evidence? If not, how is it different from deleting stuff from somewhere else? I mean, deleting information that is not used is part of how computer operate, if you're going to disallow that, you better have a pretty huge tech infrastructure to store all those memory dumps from every workstation Google has every second or so.

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

#298

Post by HPsquared »

siliconc0w wrote: post #215

Ironically at google's scale(size and global timezone footprint) the inefficiency this default setting creates likely burns millions every day from work that gets blocked or knowledge that isn't discoverable. Organize the world's information, except if it might make us look bad. This is the pennywise pound foolish leadership that has taken over.

"the cobbler's children have no shoes"

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

#299

Post by HPsquared »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #247
Paul-Craft wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. It's hard enough for me to find stuff in my company's Slack instance, never mind if everything auto-deleted after 24 hours or 30 days.

Conversations in real life get deleted after 0s! The trick is to not use chat as documentation. Documentation as documentation is way more useful. The process of creating it is valuable to clear thinking too.

It's such a boost though, to have everything recorded and searchable by default.

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

#300

Post by bryanrasmussen »

zootboy wrote: post #236
Paul-Craft wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just Google up to their old tricks again. They used to have an internal practice to add company lawyers to emails in order to try and make them privileged and undiscoverable: https://archive.is/1Bwgs I don't know what the aftermath of the DoJ action mentioned in the link was, but I hope they were sanctioned in some way for it, just like I hope they get sanctioned for what they're trying to do here.

There was a recent supreme court case where they discussed this exact practice: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/21-1397 From listening to the oral arguments, the court didn't seem to think that just CC'ing a lawyer automatically made the full communication privileged.

I get the idea that if Google was delivering drugs to someone they would start off the conversation: "Are you a cop? Cause you have to tell me if you are!"
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