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Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

wsj.com

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Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#191

Post by AlbertCory »

stingrae wrote: post #150
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #133

Funny how Google can ignore the privacy of internet users' conversations but when it comes to their employees' conversations, Google does not want to share those with the Government. According to the Government's memo supporting sanctions, Google is deleting conversations within 24h despite being under litigation holds. https://ia902501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt app…

It's because many kinds of lawsuits (not only the government's) can go into discovery and when you have 130k+ employees generating discoverable materials it becomes very costly to search and provide these for lawsuits. It's easier to set an auto-delete policy and attempt to avoid certain things from being available for it. You aren't necessarily trying to hid conversations. You are trying to reduce the amount of cont…

Um, no. You're wrong about that. And I was there.

In the beginning, all instant messages were saved. This was handy because a lot of useful, non-sensitive information was sent over IM.

Then, lawsuits and Discovery happened, and "Off The Record" became the default. You could turn things On The Record if your conversation was non-sensitive.

> You are trying to reduce the amount of content you have to search through

This is Google we're talking about here.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#193

Post by bb88 »

brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #181
bb88 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the CIA destroyed the torture video tapes to prevent embarrassment and further prosecutions of it's employees. So it kinda goes both ways.

that doesn't male either right.

My point is that I have a hard time see the Justice Department bring charges for destroying evidence when they didn't do a darn thing against those that did do evil things under the name of the US.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#195

Post by freejazz »

gmd63 wrote: post #92
freejazz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they were trying to shift liability, I think they were trying to make sure all the data was deleted, without themselves having to hit delete. It's their counsel's culpability that is being protected, i.e. the difference between being negligent or willful.

When are regulators and enforcers going to wise up to this "clever" game of disguising malicious behavior as negligence? I've seen so many people strategically play dumb that at this point I don't believe whether or not a violation was accidental should have any weight on the punishment. Nature doesn't care whether our immune systems accidentally slack off, or whether we accidentally didn't protect our cities from a…

Regulators? They are facing sanctions in a district court...

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#196

Post by freejazz »

nostrademons wrote: post #137
gmd63 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When are regulators and enforcers going to wise up to this "clever" game of disguising malicious behavior as negligence? I've seen so many people strategically play dumb that at this point I don't believe whether or not a violation was accidental should have any weight on the punishment. Nature doesn't care whether our immune systems accidentally slack off, or whether we accidentally didn't protect our cities from a…

It's very difficult to do this without introducing ThoughtCrime. The set of things that you could potentially have thought about doing is infinite. There's almost inevitably something in hindsight that you could have done to get the results that the prosecutor/plaintiff desired. The problem is that ordinary people without the benefit of hindsight fail to notice these options all the time, for all sorts of mundane rea…

> Strategic stupidity is indistinguishable, from the outside, from actual stupidity

One answer is to punish it the same. in this circumstance, I don't think the facts work for google at all as they A) had the burden, and B) lied to the court saying that they complied. The court doesn't care about the individual workers at Google, it cares that Google lied to the court and also spoiled evidence.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#197

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

pverghese wrote: post #159
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #3

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-s... > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few cu…

> The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. How the hell is this a thing. I can understand if they did this post litigation being filed then it would be a problem. How is a company supposed to anticipate when and where the government is going to file charges and keep records for them w…

In October 2019 the DoJ served Google with a Civil Investigative Demand asking for documents relating to its ad tech business and various other subjects. A month earlier, in September 2019, attorneys general for 49 states announced an investigation into Google's ad tech business, led by Texas AG Ken Paxton.

Would it be reasonable for Google to have anticipated this litigation in 2019 after those events.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#198

Post by narrator »

wmeredith wrote: post #141
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #133

Funny how Google can ignore the privacy of internet users' conversations but when it comes to their employees' conversations, Google does not want to share those with the Government. According to the Government's memo supporting sanctions, Google is deleting conversations within 24h despite being under litigation holds. https://ia902501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt app…

"Rules for thee, but not for me" may actually be the oldest trick in the book. Google's hypocrisy here is disappointing, but not surprising in the least.

Given the blacklists of google leak[1], I am betting they don't want a congressional subpoena to find out the boatloads of ridiculously politicized censorship they do either.

[1]https://www.zachvorhies.com/blacklists/

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#199

Post by stefan_ »

shadowgovt wrote: post #5
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #3

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18552824/512/1/united-s... > The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few cu…

It sounds like there were disagreements between Google's lawyers and the DOJ lawyers on the scope of the hold and what constitutes "reasonable."

This is not some kind of lawyer golf. Google employees with functions far outside legal wrote things like:

> “Let’s not talk about markets and market share via email.”

> “[W]e should chat live so you can get the history; best to not put in email.”

> “Since it’s a sensitive topic, I prefer to discuss offline or over hangout.”

This is of course not, in fact, some cute way around legal custodial requirements, no matter what the people who passed leetcode preached in trainings.

Re: Justice Department says Google destroyed evidence related to antitrust lawsuit

#200

Post by irrational »

jonstewart wrote: post #110
irrational wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual custodians just means employees, right? What incentive was there for employees to do this? I know that if I was told to do that, I would ignore it because I have better things to do than fiddle with settings. The only way I would do it is if they said I’d be fired if I didn’t do it or they increased my salary and decreased my other responsibilities.

Yes, so when you get sent a “legal hold” notice, and you click on some kind of acceptance, you are basically acknowledging that you’ll get fired if you don’t preserve the data. That’s how this works. The incentive to compliance is that you don’t get fired by your general counsel.

I’m quite certain it will come out that nobody loses their jobs over this.
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