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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]

#381

Post by seanmcdirmid »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #380
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren’t running a business, and you haven’t really dealt with your bank much beyond the e consumer level. They will cut you off as quickly as possible if they suspect anything nefarious going on. Banks are less reasonable than techs in this regards, you’ve just never used them to sell something.

>Banks are less reasonable than techs in this regards Nonsense. Banks have someone you can get on the phone, usually 24/7. Good luck getting anyone at Google on the phone.

Really they don't. They will cut you off and then maybe take your phone call. Google and Apple don't actually run their own financial services, they partner with the banks that you think are actually better, but aren't really.

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

#382

Post by quickthrower2 »

okdood64 wrote: post #345
quickthrower2 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, maybe in some ideal world where everyone has unlimited time to write documentation. Sometimes it's just nice just to be like "Oh what exactly did that person say/link a few days ago? Seemed relevant to what I'm working on, let me search the chat history..."

It is the opposite, you need unlimited time play he said/she said yoyo driven development if you don't document things. The compression ration might be 1000 words said to 20 words written, so it is no big deal. A 2% tax that is well worth it (assuming speaking and typing speeds are similar).

YMMV if the team is very small, very smart and everyone has a great memory or the problem domain is tidy.

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

#383

Post by nolok »

auggierose wrote: post #336
nolok wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is clear cut. Let's give you a concrete exemple we have had rulings on without any computer involved, which are almost a 1:1 situation: you are on litigation hold, and aren't allowed to destroy any records. You do an oral meeting, with no plans to put it on paper. Unknown to you, someone took notes during the meeting, say your secretary because she didn't feel well that day and wanted to be sure to remember it the…

What if she used the notes, and then destroyed them herself, without me ever noticing anything?

It's still a violation by the company. For obvious reason, otherwise you find a "fall guy" to do just that and "oh I was not aware I shouldn't delete this stack of documents".

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

#384

Post by nolok »

devrand wrote: post #347
nolok wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is clear cut. Let's give you a concrete exemple we have had rulings on without any computer involved, which are almost a 1:1 situation: you are on litigation hold, and aren't allowed to destroy any records. You do an oral meeting, with no plans to put it on paper. Unknown to you, someone took notes during the meeting, say your secretary because she didn't feel well that day and wanted to be sure to remember it the…

I'm not sure that's a comparable situation as someone explicitly took an action to make a record. In the case of Chat it's all software automation. No one is explicitly taking an action to make a record or destroy a record. There is the whole situation of people asking to switch to the no history mode, but that's not retroactively applied and it's really no different than sending an email that says "let's talk about…

> I'm not sure that's a comparable situation as someone explicitly took an action to make a record. In the case of Chat it's all software automation. No one is explicitly taking an action to make a record or destroy a record.

I am not sure why you are making this distinction when it doesn't exists.

Litigation hold also means stop all software automation that would result in destruction of record, doesn't matter how many people know about it. Case in point: that is what happens to their 30 days old chat. This is the same thing if you trigger a litigation hold on your office365 account or whatever.

And for the rest of your point: not only does the law not accept the "oh but I didn't know", for the obvious reason that then it's an easy out, but even if they did tolerate extreme exemple of it Google cannot in good faith claim lack of knowledge about THEIR OWN system, the litigation hold was not for those specific people who may or may not know it, it was for the company who is then in charge of ensuring their IT team does what the court ordered.

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

#385

Post by account42 »

tyingq wrote: post #356
devrand wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK you have an obligation to retain records if under a legal hold, but you do not have an obligation to create records. So if your company policy is to record all phone calls, then yes, you would need to retain and provide those records as part of discovery. However, you cannot be obligated to start recording phone calls in order to make them discoverable. > What if you were using a 3rd party chat with no history…

>Which raises the question: if you're under a legal hold are you compelled to enable that by default? Right...similar for plain old telephone calls now too. That is, many VOIP PBX systems have a simple way to enable recordings.

Pretty much any data transmitted on a network is going to spend some time in buffers before being sent off to the next hop. While extending that argument to 24 hours is obviously malicious there is obviously some threshold where something being stored shouldn't be considered stored for this purpose.

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

#386

Post by CydeWeys »

kyrra wrote: post #209
CydeWeys wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, these settings were chosen specifically to destroy evidence, and the courts are increasingly unhappy with that. All conversations involving people on legal holds (such as the CEO!) should be retained indefinitely.

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?

> What makes text chat that is meant to be ephemeral to be different than an in person chat?

It's not inherently ephemeral though. You can add deletion rules on top of that to try to pretend that it is, but the courts see right through that.

I'm struggling to think of any text-based communications that are inherently ephemeral. Generally anything committed to text is long lasting, and has always been (way pre-computer era).

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

#387

Post by squirtle24 »

dataflow wrote: post #52
squirtle24 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, but there's presumably a difference between deleting evidence vs. not having it in the first place. In the article it seems Google's "history off" feature isn't really history-off so much as it simply auto-deletes after 24h. If the chats were never logged, would they have avoided this? Also how far does the law go regarding deletion - I mean if a message was stored in memory and then released/garbage collected…

Not a lawyer, but my amateur guess is the answer to your first question would be yes, and the answer to your second question would be no, because of the common-sense understanding of how computer storage works and what it means to delete something. There's no need to have an information-theoretic definition of "destruction" here.

Relevant law cited elsewhere in the thread: "(e) Failure to Preserve Electronically Stored Information. If electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery, the court ..."

The key word is "reasonable", which is what the court must decide happened here. OTOH deliberately enabling "history off" doesn't sound like a reasonable steps to preserve records under legal hold. Having said that, I wonder if it also means voip/video calls must be recorded, especially if the feature is available in whatever app they use. Further, even if they use a purpose built "off the record" app, deliberately choosing to use such an app could be argued as failure to reasonably preserve records, if a regular history-preserving app is available. So I think the answer to my first question could be a no.

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

#388

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #94
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…

"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…

ack@google.com: "Folks, *Please do consider if we nee to start a HISTORY OFF chat for this?* Threaded chats you can't turn off history."

https://ia601707.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...

jsinouye@google.com: "Hi, please use this chat for ops/policy/BD/escalations issues that need faster response. Please note: I would like to keep history off. Members are Shie, Camille, Dan, Court, Sherry, Jintae, Ash, Jami, me."

https://ia801707.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...

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

#389

Post by Ferret7446 »

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…

That's a dangerous path. It implies that anything that so much as touches a computer must be preserved for the government. There absolutely should be a category for data to be transmitted with the understanding that it will not be preserved. Otherwise, you will just push people to use analog communication channels (or legal arguments around "what is a record", "what about E2E encrypted", "do debug logs count", etc), and for what? No one wins.

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

#390

Post by Ferret7446 »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #57
hackernewds wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> couldn't this just be circumvented by having an in-person meeting? here I present you a case for the perils of remote work

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 don't see a functional difference between a video chat and a text chat beyond the technical limitation that if a text message isn't kept for a short period of time then the recipient will likely not be able to read it.

Where would you draw the line?

Telling another human to deliver a verbal message only within the next 24 hours is okay. Training a parrot to do it is okay. Programming a robot to do the same is okay? Programming a computer to do that is not?

Is it okay if it's a one hour delay? Four hours? Until it detects that the user has read it? Until the user manually marks it as read (does that count as explicit deletion)? If it's stored in RAM? On an HDD? On an SSD in swap? On ticker tape?

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