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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

#61

Post by 1letterunixname »

voisin wrote: post #45
hackernewds wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”

Yep. Probably as a field in employee records API, DBMS, and/or business rules processor as a synthetic attribute called "legal_hold" to combine requirements of all legal cases and jurisdictions.

Every system and process that could potentially delete data needs to check "legal_hold".

One of many fun feature requirements of enterprise software that aren't necessarily needed at smaller scales.

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

#62

Post by shadowgovt »

omginternets wrote: post #31
choppaface wrote: post #17

And they also teach employees how to Communicate with Care: always CC a lawyer and ask a question. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/03/google-routinely... The issue here is not so much that Google is playing these games but how this draws energy away from OTHER games-- i.e. shipping and keeping alive new products and offering real customer service for existing ones.

I’m curious, what is the legal process for dealing with manufactured privilege?

What is manufactured privilege?

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

#64

Post by tantalor »

cma wrote: post #55
tantalor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is, if you are on a lit hold and preserving some of your written communications, then you have to preserve all of them. You can't decide to shield some of them. That makes sense, I guess, but why would that not apply to verbal communications as well?

> why would that not apply to verbal communications as well? Corporate body cams. They wanted it first for fast food register workers but maybe it comes to white collar jobs first (aside from police). It is already sort of there with work from home surveillance-ware.

For that matter, the assistants built into phones and smart home devices are always listening for their wake word, I assume they have a little buffer of recorded sound which they are constantly erasing. Is that spoliation?

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

#65

Post by deelowe »

shadowgovt wrote: post #50
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 j…

A bit of a shitty answer though when the context surrounding the discussion was about whether Google was doing anything to protect privacy. Apple, by comparison, seems to have navigated the same environment extremely well. They of course can't prevent certain things from happening, but for what's within their control, they are doing what they can.

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

#66

Post by ROTMetro »

shadowgovt wrote: post #47
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.

Then companies will just get rid of chat tools because informal discussions can be turned to fit any narrative.

'wow, Bob picked the worst possible way to solve xyz' negligence, knowingly having incompetent developers. You yourself said Bob's solutions were the worst possible.

'looking back, we should have implemented XYZ differently but we are stuck with that implementation now' can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court.

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

#67

Post by briffle »

1letterunixname wrote: post #49

Want to wipe your work computer and put a new version of Linux on it? First, check your legal hold status. Want to delete any kind of employee data? First, filter out users by legal hold status.

I get the point you are trying to make, but usually the holding is on the servers. Most mail and communications servers allow for this.. (ie, don't actually delete any emails that mention the company ACME because of a legal hold number 123434).

And I (A sysadmin) have literally been tasked with overnighting employee laptops to foresnic groups, and issuing them a brand new one. (typically, they just image the drives, and send them back, we would wipe the system, and put it back in our 'spare pool'.)

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

#68

Post by freejazz »

vagabund wrote: post #38
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…

Somebody at Google made the conscious decision that enacting this intentionally defective policy -- in doing so, attempting to foist liability for data custody upon individual employees -- and fighting the inevitable objections to it was a preferable course of action to actually preventing their employees from discussing anything that might be used against them in the suit. It's clever, but it doesn't reflect fondly…

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.

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

#69

Post by nosefrog »

> The government said the company only committed this week to permanently preserve its employees’ chat messages—after DOJ officials informed Google they would file their motion for sanctions.

As a current Google employee, I'm very happy about this change.

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

#70

Post by donalhunt »

shadowgovt wrote: post #50
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 j…

As someone who heard this first hand (probably at an all-hands or TGIF), the quote from the earlier post was very much not "don't use communication channels that leave a trail" and much more "don't do illegal shit".

In addition, I fondly remember him quibbing that there is no internet in jail. :/

Saying that, I'll leave you in the knowledge that Google Meet is excellent for off the record conversations (and executives are great for ignoring rules set for the rest of the company).

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