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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]

#301

Post by hgsgm »

zelon88 wrote: post #144
jkaplowitz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why does everyone just assume that the software Google/Slack/other video/chat platforms use actually respect any of those settings? For all we know they simply mark this data as "deleted" and the GUI won't show it to you. In the USA there is practically no recourse users have if SAAS/PAAS simply decides to keep this data and not tell you about it. Google won't be investigated or punished, and you'll never get anyone…

The OP is about Google in court right now.

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

#302

Post by hgsgm »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #12
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #8

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?

Google was under a litigation hold order to preserve all written or otherwise recorded communications related to the litigation.

The complaint was about foreseeable, future litigation.

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

#303

Post by hgsgm »

jacquesm wrote: post #90
tguvot wrote: post #59

It's even funnier reading than famous McKinsey email: In one internal email sent in July 2018, a McKinsey executive appears to acknowledge the growing legal risk faced by Purdue Pharma over its opioid business. "It probably makes sense to have a quick conversation with the risk committee to see if we should be doing anything other that [sic] eliminating all our documents and emails," McKinsey senior partner Martin El…

> "It probably makes sense to have a quick conversation with the risk committee to see if we should be doing anything other that [sic] eliminating all our documents and emails," Gah that is so incredible dumb and the fact that he didn't check himself before hitting 'send' is just perfect. Nothing like a bit of hubris to go with the mindset of a criminal. It makes you wonder what 'anything other' referred to.

Explicitly writing down the crimes your peers/bosses are committing (and normalize doing so) is a way to blow the whistle with less hassle.

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

#304

Post by hgsgm »

jmole wrote: post #48
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of this is particularly surprising I am not a vengeful type. But people need to be punished to a shocking degree until this is fixed. It should be surprising. And it should have terrible, if not horrific, consequences.

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".

The people in question are the people who create the policy.

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

#305

Post by auggierose »

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…

Not familiar with the details in this case, but it makes total sense to me that an "off the record" chat doesn't need to be preserved, even by a court order to keep all records. Let's assume there is a chat app that is officially designed to be off-the-record, and everyone who uses it assumes it is off-the-record. Let's assume technology-wise, there are indeed no records kept, everything is ephemeral. Should the court order then apply to those chats? I don't think so, just as a court order doesn't apply to a live conversation which isn't recorded. Now assume that the programmer of the app made an error, and accidentally records are kept for 24 hours. Should the court order now apply to those records? Doesn't seem to be a clear-cut case to me.

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

#306

Post by hgsgm »

Spivak wrote: post #217
kyrra wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In-person and video/audio/phone conversations do not have the same requirements. What makes text chat that is meant to be ephemeral to be different than an in person chat?

I'm kinda sympathetic to Google in this case because the law makes it basically impossible to communicate with writing in a way that doesn't leave a paper trail. Messages being at minimum temporarily stored so you can read them is inherent to the medium. It does seem reasonable that there should be some way, (outlined by the courts) to ephemerally text that gives it the same protections as an unrecorded phone call. B…

It's the reverse. Phone calls and in person are loopholes that the government doesn't have a way to force recording of. Fundamentally, the law is paradoxical. Freedom is in tension with law enforcement.

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

#307

Post by MertsA »

steveBK123 wrote: post #71
pclmulqdq wrote: post #30

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…

I work at a big tech company (not Google) and this flagrant contempt for the legal hold is absolutely shocking to me. We're also under a legal hold. It has nothing to do with anything relating to my work. I will never have anything responsive to any kind of discovery request, I don't even work on a product team, only infra. The company is preserving everything that could even hypothetically be responsive to some future discovery request. If I need to reimage my work laptop, I can't, current company guidance is to return the laptop to IT and get a new machine because they need to preserve any data on the laptop. Email is being archived, there's regular communications about making sure everyone from top to bottom knows to preserve anything tangentially related to the legal hold.

During yearly compliance training one thing that was stressed was not to mark anything A/C Priv unless it actually was. They made sure to call out that including someone from legal in an email chain does not make it A/C Priv and not to try anything like that. At the time I thought it was silly that the training went over such obvious things as "don't commit white collar crimes" in essence but apparently that's not how they do things at Google. I just can't wrap my head around why any of the many different people involved could ever look at what they were doing and think "yes, this is fine, I should continue this behavior". WTAF.

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

#308

Post by ranting-moth »

auggierose wrote: post #305
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…

Not familiar with the details in this case, but it makes total sense to me that an "off the record" chat doesn't need to be preserved, even by a court order to keep all records. Let's assume there is a chat app that is officially designed to be off-the-record, and everyone who uses it assumes it is off-the-record. Let's assume technology-wise, there are indeed no records kept, everything is ephemeral. Should the cour…

It's very clear-cut. The topic is about deleting data.

There's a massive difference in deleting records that did exists vs. records that never existed in the first place.

The former is deleting data, the second case isn't.

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

#310

Post by tyingq »

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…

The loophole for face-to-face and telephone conversations is sort of interesting. I wonder if it remains because it historically wasn't historically practical to record...or solely because of eavesdropping/consent laws. Or some combination of the two? What if you were using a 3rd party chat with no history capability at all...where does that fall?
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