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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

#41

Post by jvolkman »

Name_Chawps wrote: post #23
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…

This is particularly funny because one way Google scams people to get them to buy more storage space is by moving deleted drive/Gmail items to the Drive Trash instead of deleting them. So when you try to clear space by deleting emails etc., it doesn't seem to help. Furthermore, even if you clear your Trash, it can take hours to take effect (for Some Reason), making it seem like you need to just give up and buy more s…

When I click on trash it says "Items in trash are deleted forever after 30 days", so I don't really understand this complaint. Trash is a feature that most users have come to expect in file management systems.

Also, "turn off history" - which seems to be what this complaint is about - is just a public feature of the Chat app built into gmail.

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

#43

Post by mitchellst »

I'll add a recent misfortune for a peer company: https://www.abajournal.com/web/article/judge-sanctions-faceb...

Looks like the real powers in the US are losing patience with some of the low-level legal tomfoolery of big tech. About time. Nothing against the companies, but make your money by making products people love, not by playing footsie with the court system.

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

#44

Post by theptip »

saagarjha wrote: post #11

I think we’re going to see another cycle in tech, much like the one where they realized that people kept saying illegal things in a documented fashion and this kept getting them into trouble leading to short retention policies. Except this time it will probably involve mandatory court-ordered retention which will further push people towards dropping “let’s discuss this offline” comments and trying to hide their conve…

Not just tech; we're seeing this pressure in finance too. Matt Levine joked about this recently:

> 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 or make trades.” “Conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels”! Imagine if that was really the rule! You can’t have lunch with a client and talk about business, or have beers with your colleagues and gripe about work, because that does not create a searchable archive for the SEC to review.

> Of course the SEC does not entirely mean this. Yet. But in like five years, technology — and the SEC’s interpretation of the rules — will have advanced to the point that banks will get fined if their bankers talk about business with clients on the golf course. “You should have been wearing your bank-issued virtual reality headset and recorded the conversation,” the SEC will say, or I guess “you should have played golf in your bank’s official metaverse, which records all golf conversations for compliance review, rather than on a physical golf course.” The golf course is an unofficial channel! No business allowed!

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

#45

Post by voisin »

hackernewds wrote: post #6
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…

> That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. they cannot reasonably expect every day employees with no stakes or info into the confidential dealings would care about this. Al Alongside Google wouldn't care about them not caring.

The company has the obligation and the liability if the obligation isn’t met. They should have enacted a system to ensure their obligations were met. It’s like saying “we knew we owed taxes but the employees responsible for remitting the taxes just didn’t. Oopsies”

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

#46

Post by jvolkman »

AlphaCharlie wrote: post #2

It's true, it was well known internally that internal chat that are sensitive would be auto deleted.

Presumably if that hadn't been known, sensitive topics would've been discussed over Meet or in a physical room instead and the data still wouldn't be available to the DOJ.

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

#47

Post by shadowgovt »

jefftk wrote: post #24

What's depressingly hilarious is that employees generally hated this behavior, because useful information would often disappear before you were done with it. For example, someone answers your question on Friday after you've left and when you check messages on Monday it's gone. Or you'd want to refer to something from a conversation a few days ago and it'd been deleted as well.

I don't have a horse in this race (anymore), but in the abstract I would love if government aligned incentives so that it was more painful for companies to toss records that should have been retained than to retain records that are damaging to them in hindsight, which they were legally allowed at some point to toss.

For precisely the reason you indicated.

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

#48

Post by meltyness »

crazysim wrote: post #4
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…

Turning off dogfood? https://workspace.google.com/products/vault/

Google since 2012 still the kid playing soccer that's been told to run around and kick people in the shins except it's 18 now and it's not cute anymore, and now it's kicked a ref.

They are dogfooding, which is why trying to adopt their products has been a case study in getting screwed.

- GCal spam anyone, who hasn't been coming to unwanted meetings?

- How about 4-5 redundant messaging services?

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

#50

Post by shadowgovt »

megous wrote: post #42

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." ~Eric Schmidt lol

He catches a lot of shit for his phrasing, but Schmidt had a habit of saying true things in a way that maximized the odds they'd be received poorly.

(In context, they were talking about the long-retention and implicit-digital-footprint effects on online services, and he was noting that the trends were only going to become "more observation" and "more retention" over time... At some point, it becomes much cheaper to just not do the thing online if you want to preserve your privacy

... and in general, he was right. It's not just government observation; it's corporate observation and private observation, and the ability to churn through someone's entire Twitter history, etc., etc.).

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