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.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appearing on CNBC once said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
If Google is not doing anything wrong, then why not give the Government what it is are asking for and let justice prevail.
Google collects and surveils internet users' conversations on a mass scale without a subpoena, for whatever purpose(s) it chooses, for profit. To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare, that's apparently acceptable. However when the Government subpoenas Google for Google's conversations, for the sole purpose of determining whether Google is complying with the law, Google resists.
Personal data mining on billions of people. No problem. Monitoring employees to catch leakers and whistleblowers. Can do. Saving employee chats to satisty document requests from the Government. Too time-consuming and burdensome!
There is perhaps no company in the world better equipped to comb through peoples' conversations.
> Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appearing on CNBC once said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
It's always funny when Eric Schmidt says stuff like that.
> One day Denise Griffin got a call from Eric Schmidt’s assistant. “There’s this information about Eric in the indexes,” she told Griffin. “And we want it out.” In Griffin’s recollection, it dealt with donor information from a political campaign, exactly the type of public information that Google dedicated itself to making accessible. Griffin explained that it wasn’t Google policy to take things like that out of the index just because people didn’t want it there. Principles always make sense until it’s personal,” she says.
> Then in July 2005, a CNET reporter used Schmidt as an example of how much personal information Google search could expose. Though she used only information that anyone would see if they typed Schmidt’s name into his company’s search box, Schmidt was so furious that he blackballed the news organization for a year.
> “My personal view is that private information that is really private, you should be able to delete from history,” Schmidt once said. But that wasn’t Google’s policy...
Google will decide what people should and shouldnt do. Google will decide whether people deserve privacy in their lives for certain things or not. Language of the abusers.
I al hoping that one day American society will wake up to the fact that Tyranny can, and has been privatised. It is not only the state that you should be afraid of.
Surveillance capitalism is several orders of fucked up, but to call it tyranny is pretty dismissive of the plight of people living under actual tyranny.
> it's not dismissive. Both are evil on a spectrum. One does not negate the plightgs [sic] of the other.
There are generational labor camps in North Korea and a litany of horrible ongoing civil wars in Africa. They are evil. So is industry pushback against unleaded aviation fuel [1][2]. But comparing the evils of the civil war in Somalia to those of leaded avgas is, at best, pointless.
No one has compared them except you. Using a word doesn't automatically mean someone is equating everything under the umbrella. You would do better to focus on the definition of the word if you're so inclined on arguing - "cruel and oppressive government or rule.". I think this holds with the original point that Google can be seen as oppressive rule since they decide the rules, which don't necessarily align with what the people think is right.
Cool. I'm going to stop calling the guy who killed one of my friends a murderer, or the Sacklers. It's really disrespectful to the people who were killed by Hitler or Pol Pot.
Yes, but your point is? This is a thread about Google and their abuses, so it makes sense that is what is being discussed (not invalidating that there are much worse things happening in the world).
There’s a point where the difference disappears, we aren’t there yet, but in a way walking in that direction happy as sheep. Grass is green and there’s only a couple dogs around and they don’t bite, mostly, so all is fine.
Privacy for google, other corporations and the government is a one way street. You give it to them. There is no reciprocity. That's it. And that's how it's staying. The end.
This is how tyrants are able to talk the talk (but not the walk) and bark out moral high ground orders to those they rule, while doing whatever degenerate acts they like behind closed doors. That's what power is and does.
> 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.
It's kind of weird that we've turned formerly ephemeral things into "evidence" just because they could optionally be stored.
If it was a few decades ago, the kind of things happening in these chats would have happened in person or on the telephone with nobody necessarily recording it. Whether to store them or for how long is an arbitrary choice.
You probably have your phone with you all the time. It has a microphone in it. Is not recording your every conversation "destruction of evidence"? What if the microphone is always on (because it's listening for voice commands) so the audio is stored temporarily in memory before being deleted?
The precedents cases like this set don't just apply to huge corporations.
> If it was a few decades ago, the kind of things happening in these chats would have happened in person or on the telephone with nobody necessarily recording it.
Or on paper, maybe by memo. And they would have destroyed the paper evidence just the same, and claimed helplessness in the face of so much paper that had to be kept, and that the suspicion of their motives amounts to being convicted before trial. Same sort of arguments, except for the people handling paper holding on to data wasn't a matter of getting a few people to click around for a few days, it was wrangling dozens of banker's boxes of paper. Trucks and warehouses.
> It's kind of weird that we've turned formerly ephemeral things into "evidence" just because they could optionally be stored.
This is literally what evidence is. It's something that you carefully collect and store to review later in connection with something else. You don't have to "store" the knife you stabbed somebody with or the gun you shot someone with (you've already got enough use out of them) but if somebody destroys them, they're destroying evidence. Even if you threw it out with the kitchen trash, and you always take out the trash on Thursdays.
You're not getting out of the problem that the distinction is essentially arbitrary. You could record everything you say in private. Every single frame that appears on any screen in the company was in some piece of memory at some point in time. What principled distinction are you proposing between what is and isn't a crime to not actively retain?
If the feds essentially want to wiretap you, why should that happen at your expense instead of theirs? Even in cases when you're innocent?
> This is literally what evidence is. It's something that you carefully collect and store to review later in connection with something else. You don't have to "store" the knife you stabbed somebody with or the gun you shot someone with (you've already got enough use out of them) but if somebody destroys them, they're destroying evidence.
There is a distinction between physical objects and information. If you have a knife, destroying it isn't an ordinary thing to do. Meanwhile we have serious concerns about TLC solid state drives which make them unsuitable for many purposes because you can only erase and rewrite them about a thousand times.
Computers inherently operate by rearranging bits. Writing something new coincides with erasing what was there before. Keeping everything forever isn't feasible. So where's the line?
This doesn’t seem right to me. There was a relatively short period of time when phone conversations were ubiquitous, cheap and fleeting, but for the the majority of history, business communication was performed in writing, and we’ve basically gone back to that with the advent of ubiquitous email and messaging.
"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.
You are demonstrating scary level of Moral Confusion.
CIA operates in the National interest, at least hypothetically. Google can operate against national interest to make money, or 'whoever pays most' interest.
The people of USA have granted CIA privileges of secrecy and legal protections explicitly to do ShadyShit. No-one ever gave Google permission to do ShadyShit.
CIA employees go through background checks, US Gov can fire head of CIA for being a dick. Google hires whoever the fuck they want and US government can't fire head of Google no matter what he does.
If Google is ever found doing 1% of what CIA does legally (and there ain't much!), they need to be in jail real fast.
Even on your own terms, why is this a "scary" moral confusion? If its just a matter of being in a different country with the wrong economics to end up being surveiled and harrased and ultimately dead in the jungle with the rest of my family, out of as you say U.S. "National interest", that's much more arbritrary than it is moral. Not everyone is American.
But I guess, those countries "shouldn't have been doing it in the first place" right?
Governments have other ways of removing people. Capitalists and corporations are supper easy to get along with, all they care about is money. Bits of paper with powerful geometry, well known faces and numbers on them. The bigger the number the better! No need to assassinate or accident the capitalist. Any vision for the future of mankind, even the most modest of ideals, they come after profit. The slightest nudge from law makers could shake the biggest corporations. The CEO would quit himself to prevent further disruption of the cosy relationship.
How much do your morals swing as you travel different countries or even states? Age of consent being an example of morality - the legal age varies by country but it would be sociopathetic if someone were to “shop around.” Morality is not legality; the law _aspires_ to codify the spirit of a society’s morals - therefore it is morality that dictates to law, and law aims to catch up to morality when zeitgeists change. Equating the two things would be a poor understanding of sociology and civic politics.
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.
More like people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
They should prioritize prosecuting other parts of the government for known offenses. Then when those high level officials are serving long prison sentences they can take the same action against private entities without looking like hypocrites.
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.
What do you think about the assertion that these blacklists are for ads?
From the linked internal discussion on the shooting: "changes to ad serving and changes to search ranking are done completely independently, and by different teams". Isn't it a good idea not to serve ads on sites that are discussing a recent national trauma? Or at the very least not really related to politics?
> Isn't it a good idea not to serve ads on sites that are discussing a recent national trauma? Or at the very least not really related to politics?
I say no, because that devalues truthful reporting on real and important events, in favour of safe pablum that will pass the censors. Real news is important, but who is paying for news if it's not funded by ads?
I mean bad as in “the people paying for the ad slots wouldn’t want it” not “it’s better for society”. Obviously the only morally good answer here is to abolish capitalist profit-seeking organizations altogether, but I’m Assuming I’m preaching to the choir. If you have a company that’s bound by law to seek as much profit as possible, can you really get mad at them for not wanting to show their dumb mobile game ads next to stories about a recent massacre?
As Carl Schmitt wrote in 1922, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." Schmitt is somewhat out of favor, but his protege Leo Strauss basically created the times we now suffer.
> To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare
You are probably using the wrong expression.
Corporate Welfare means Welfare for Corporations. So it's when a government bestows money grants, tax breaks, or other special favourable treatment for corporations.
It is nothing to do with employees, not paying excessive salaries, or keeping unproductive ones around.
It does not imply that main beneficiaries are employees, typically it's about C-suite and shareholders.
The DMCA lets google crowdsource “upload disney’s catalog to youtube, slap ads on them, and profit while cementing our monopoly”. It also let’s them arbitrarily hobble open source web browsers and android forks with DRM.
Disney was much better off under the old regime, where they could have collected statutory damages from Google each time a movie was uploaded to YouTube.
"Do the right thing" was the motto of the perpetrator of every great evil in human history.
Okay sure, perhaps some serial killers knew they were doing the wrong thing but you don't commit genocide unless you've convinced yourself that you're doing the right thing.
To do evil on a grand scale you must have righteousness and conviction in abundance.
"Don't be evil" at least admits the possibility of asking "Wait. are we the baddies?" and answering it with something other than "Of course not, we Do the Right Thing".
Google Chat autodeletes ALL conversations after 24 hours. Not a legal thing. Not only a Google thing--it would do this for any other company using GSuite.
It's a bit of a stretch for the government to assume this feature exists solely to piss off the government.
> 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.
The hypocrisy is maddening.
Compare it with Zuckerberg plugging his mic with a dud 3.5mm connector.
Some years ago I got glad and impressed by a friend landing a job as a SWE at Google. Nowadays I just feel pity and disgust for him working there.
I would write "how times change" but the thing is I just hadn't realized how bad Google was 5 years ago.
> Google collects and surveils internet users' conversations on a mass scale without a subpoena, for whatever purpose(s) it chooses, for profit. To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare, that's apparently acceptable.
There are 300 million people that live in the United States. Do you think they all agree with the country’s policies with regards to surveillance? How about pretty much any other country?
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 content you have to search through during discovery.
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
> 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.
If only they have technology that would help them doing such searches...
Discovery was different when most communications were in person and company memos we're on paper. Even then companies shredded memos after a while, they're not worth the cost to store them.
Now with computers and everyone working via slack all day it's cheap to store everything everyone has said in your company and the laws around discovery haven't been updated so all of that content now has to be checked at the cost of the one being sued.
No, this is what the legal team would say when people asked them why they instituted a short retention policy and they didn’t want to say “we keep having crimes show up when people do discovery against us”. This would also result in an attempt to reduce the amount of content needed to search through during discovery.
> No, this is what the legal team would say when people asked them why they instituted a short retention policy and they didn’t want to say “we keep having crimes show up when people do discovery against us”.
This is the corporate response to the modern "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" legal system.
Everybody is always breaking the law, often because following it is impossible (e.g. different laws require mutually incompatible actions), but mostly because nobody knows all the laws and people regularly break them unintentionally.
Corporate lawyers have no ability to change this since it would require making the laws clear and consistent and simple enough for people to understand, so instead they try to make it harder for anyone to find which laws their clients broke.
Then we have to try not to cheer when the victim is somebody we don't like.
> 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 custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. This means that for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours.
> All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had “put a legal hold in place” that “suspends auto-deletion.”
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 on Google's underlying antitrust behavior, and I'd be pissed as an employee.
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 flood. Why would we provide an incentive structure for people to act like they are stupid?
> When are regulators and enforcers going to wise up to this "clever" game of disguising malicious behavior as negligence?
Thankfully in finance many of them already have. In the UK there a number of “Prescribed Responsibility” roles which financial organisations are required to fill with a single individual. That individual is required to be competent, knowledgeable and aware of any company actions that fall within their area of responsibility. It’s a criminal offence for them to fail on any of those three points, and also criminal for a financial organisation to appoint someone who couldn’t reasonably be expected to meet those three points. The organisation is also required to make sure those roles are only held by senior executives with real decision making power.
As a consequence there is no space for wilful ignorance, or enacting policies to try and distribute decision making. Attempting those, and then having your company later found to be breaking the law, would result in personal criminal liability for the executive involved.
I think people being negligent legitimately happens quite a bit. I agree though that when it comes to corporate behaviour, negligence should just be treated as willful intent.
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 reasons. If you criminalize negligence you're going to sweep an awful lot of innocent people up in your dragnet.
Strategic stupidity is indistinguishable, from the outside, from actual stupidity. I'd bet the latter is significantly more common. Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Okay, so we could dispose with a whole raft of individual crimes:
No-one should ever be prosecuted for theft, because Theft requires malice, I thought I was taking abandoned goods! No-one should be prosecuted for fraud, I just accidentally omitted the fact that the item I am selling does not work?
When are you going to wise up to the fact that, if you do the same things Google does, you will be convicted immediately.
The corporate structure allows them to avoid liability and deliberately create vagueness as to who's fault it is. This is 100% intentional. And they've done nothing to deserve this privilege.
I'm suggesting we abandon "ThoughtCrime". The way it is now, people analyze your intent and if they determine it is malicious you get punished. If you pretend to be ignorant you get let off the hook.
Trying to look into someone's head is bad. That's what I'm saying.
> 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.
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 storage.
Apparently Google execs don't have the same problems deleting their own files.
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.
Exactly.. But the funny thing is as an IT admin at hospital, I have seen people who literally were saving mail in their trash folder in hopes to "archive" then got mad when we did some house keeping in Exchange.
Yeah, but most non-technical people see that their gmail is full, try deleting a bunch of emails, see that it didn't help, and then have to buy more space. They're not aware there's a trash, they perhaps don't even use Drive at all. They just know that what they're doing isn't working.
(... and the reason Google does Drive Trash is that destroying user data is a much worse user experience than letting the delete be lazy, even when the user has given signal they want the data destroyed. There's decades of UX research to back that assertion; it's why "trash cans" were created in the first place as a UI abstraction.
Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disrupt your career by deleting some critical info, that's on you. Outside Google, they try to provide a better experience for their users).
> Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disrupt your career by deleting some critical info, that's on you.
They should consistently apply the deletion policy, in fact, they should go even further and do what governments do to their own sensitive information: keep a deletion log that stores item IDs, authors and content types (but not the contents) that had been deleted along with the initiator and the date of deletion and the IP address of the machine that received the deletion. Something at Google's scale deserves ğovernment-level scrutiny.
> 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.
There’s a big company called Google that, among other things, sells enterprise services, and they have a list of their apps that support litigation holds:
Very much so. Leaving aside some of the other points made on this, there's also a "eh, it's obviously not -that- important if it's not being enforced by policy/admin..."
They can be if the policy was that individual employees needed to self enforce retention on XYZ topics and employees were provided training to that effect. The Feds can not say a company must retain all records going forward, only that it make reasonable effort to retain relevant records and training employees to place items going forward in some sort of vault historically qualifies, especially when this training/retention has been vetted as being acceptable by corporate/insurance company legal teams. There is no mens rea element to having system constraints due to an existing IT infrastructure budget and the Feds don't get to just blow that budget up because 'they have concerns' or else they could use 'concerns' as a weapon to destroy companies.
The issue seems to be around use of "off the record" chat settings which are not covered by Vault (somewhat surprisingly for this audience; quite desirably for the target audience it would seem).
I doubt that nearly every google workspace customer uses google's chat. Having workspace just means that google's chat is available. The enterprises I work with, when asked, have said that they use or are moving to teams, and chatting is either outright banned or restricted. Other than that, Slack is used for non-scheduled chats.
I'm sure there are other programs that various enterprises use, but I've never met one that uses Google's chat.
> They can be if the policy was that individual employees needed to self enforce retention on XYZ topics and employees were provided training to that effect.
Whatever the policy is, the company is obligated to preserve evidence. Internal policy does not change that.
> The Feds can not say a company must retain all records going forward
Not only can they, that's literally what the law (federal law for sure, and separately the law of every state, to the best of my knowledge), does require regarding evidence related to ongoing and reasonably anticipated litigation. There is an unconditional requirement to preserve evidence that is known, or reasonably should be known, to be relevant.
> There is no mens rea element to having system constraints due to an existing IT infrastructure budget
The legal requirement to retain evidence once litigation begins or is reasonably forseeable is not conditioned on “so long as that is easily doable within your pre-existing IT infrastructure budget”. If you don’t have a sufficient budget to meet your obligations when you become aware of them, you are obligate to take any steps reasonably necessary to meet those obligations, and if you fail to meet the obligations, there are legal remedies within the relevant litigation for simple failure without regard to mental state (though willful failures have more significant potential remedies within the case, up to and including instantly losing the case without trial.)
Mens rea also matters a lot for whether additional civil and criminal penalties beyond sanctions in the immediate case are available (such as criminal charges of destroying records or documents to obstruct a federal investigation under 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1519), though.
Sure, but they need to ensure that their have training and audits/enforcement to ensure the policy works for everyone who isn't intentionally trying to cheat. If it was 1/a few employee(s) who didn't do the right thing, then that employee should probably go to prison for breaking the law. That is was most who didn't do the right thing suggests that the right thing was too hard to do, and it goes back to the company. (even if it is one employee they can make the case that they didn't understand the policy for some reason, which might put liability back on the company, but this is case by case)
> Feds don't get to just blow that budget up because 'they have concerns' or else they could use 'concerns' as a weapon to destroy companies.
Hello government, please leave my factory. Stop collecting evidence of the recent lethal safety incident, we need to mop up the blood and continue production. Yes, I know I am suspected of breaching the laws on workplace safety, but otherwise we'll blow the budget!
Hello government, I am sorry to say you won't be getting any of those emails you've subpoenaed that incriminate me, I had to delete them to save $5 on my outlook subscribtion, it was blowing my budget.
The consequences of being found to have destroyed evidence is one of the reasons why organizations generally treat litigation / potential litigation holds broadly. (Also, unless you know there is no possible way something could be beneficial, you never know what, touching on the broad issue of litigation, you might actually need yourself, e.g., to rebut an argument from the other side.)
From what I'm seeing they're seeking monetary fines against Google for this, and at their scale that's hardly a deterrent. It always works out to be a fraction of what they'd actually have to pay if they hadn't pulled whatever bullshit got them fined, and in the end won't impact them or their bottom line in the slightest. Until the fines are high enough to actually deter them, or they start pressing criminal charges for shit like this, nothing gonna change with these huge megacorps.
> From what I'm seeing they're seeking monetary fines against Google for this
This is false. They are seeking a finding that Google destroyed evidence, and a hearing to assess sanctions, and an order for Google to make additional evidence available before the hearing. [0]
While fines might be part of the sanctions, a very common sanction for destruction of evidence is adverse inference jury instructions in the litigation the evidence was relevant to.
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.
Don't change the goalposts. It's not about collectively agreeing on what is reasonable.
From the article: "Federal rules for litigation required Google to suspend deleting chats in mid-2019, when Google would have anticipated the antitrust lawsuit, the government said. But Google continued using “off the record chats” even after the lawsuit was filed, the DOJ’s attorneys wrote."
> 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 waiting.
If the government was concerned they should have filed the lawsuit sooner not in 2020
It's very much a thing. The question is whether Google in preparation for an upcoming court action decided to start throwing records away. People don't get away with that before a divorce, before selling a company, or in any other situation.
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.
> How is a company supposed to anticipate when and where the government is going to file charges and keep records for them waiting.
It is not just the government, evidence preservations rules attach for any relevant documents at the point where litigation is either initiated, or is, or reasonably should be, anticipated, regardless of whether the government is a party to the regulation. In the specific case of government action, knowledge of existence and subject matter of a government investigation generally provides a basis on which litigation on the subject should be reasonably anticipated (ditto with, e.g., an explicit threat of litigation by a private party. This is well-established law.
If you and I have a private dispute, you sue, and I tell your lawyers I shredded everything related to the case because I routinely shred my papers at the end of each month, even if that's true, I'm probably going to settle for more than had I maintained records. (Assuming I wasn't blatantly lying.) The shred-it-all approach has its upsides. But it also comes with liability.
After you sue, if you shred then you are in trouble. How do you anticipate what documents you need and when a legal suit is going to be filed by an unrelated party
I user to work for an Automotive OEM, and I would get these emails with some frequency (sent to the whole company) that would instruct us to make sure we're not deleting or clearing materials related to some thing. I don't think the whole time I worked there any of it related to anything I was working on. We eventually had a training with counsel about keeping materials and why we didn't even want the appearance of anything suspicious.
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?
When you have a corporate slogan that says "Don't Be Evil" it means there's a big internal desire to start cackling alone at night in contemplation of your own evil (Frank Herbert quote, there). Looks like they lost that struggle against temptation.
Just for fun, below is taken verbatim from Google's Memo in Support of its Motion to Transfer Venue filed earlier this week in the latest antitrust case in the Eastern District of Virginia. After reading, take the quiz.
Google's lawyers first began anticipating litigation in
(a) 2020
(b) 2021
(c) 2022
(d) 2023
(e) none of the above.
"In September 2019, the attorneys general of forty-eight States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico announced an investigation into Googles ad tech business, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.1 At the same time, the DOJ opened its own antitrust investigation into Googles ad tech business.2 In October 2019, the DOJ issued a Civil Investigative Demand to Google calling for production of documents relating to Googles ad tech business, along with a host of other topics. These two investigations of the same Google ad tech business proceeded in parallel. The DOJ and Texas both made expansive requests for production of documents concerning Googles ad tech."
1 See Harper Neidig, 50 attorneys general launch antitrust investigation into Google, The Hill (Sept. 9, 2019),
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.
That a subordinate did not perform their duties does not absolve their superior of the consequences.
The responsibility still ultimately falls on Google Legal and up to the executive team. They can choose to fire people if it makes them feel better, I suppose, but it won't change the consequences they will now face in litigation.
I think "custodians" in this case means the administrators of the chat system. It was within their power to preserve this data, and they did not do so.
That's not what that means. That's a pre-emptive argument in case Google tries to say that individual employees were responsible for preserving evidence.
> Google may argue that it relied on individual custodians to manually preserve history-off chats. But that argument should be rejected for two reasons.
> First, it is and was Google’s obligation to suspend auto-deletion policies; it is no defense to suggest that individual custodians—Google employees—owned that obligation. Samsung, 881 F. Supp. 2d at 1137 (“[I]t generally is recognized that when a company or organization has a document retention policy, it is obligated to suspend that policy . . . .”) (cleaned up) (italics added). Google designed the chat systems and document preservation policies at issue here.
> And Google elected to set the default to history off for many chats. Indeed, Google maintained the “off the record” default despite employee complaints that the default caused them to lose important conversations.19
> Second, Google cannot escape sanctions by shifting the blame to its custodians. For spoliation purposes, destruction of evidence by Google’s employees is attributable to the
company. See, e.g., E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. v. Kolon Indus., Inc., 803 F. Supp. 2d 469, 506‒07 (E.D. Va. 2011) (“A party may be held responsible for the spoliation of relevant evidence done by its agents.”). Courts commonly sanction corporate litigants for the spoliation of their employees and executives. See, e.g., Borum, 332 F.R.D. at 42 (emails deleted by employee). Accordingly, Google violated its duty to preserve potentially relevant evidence on a daily basis from May 2019 through the present.
If true even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again.
One assumes that if anyone had asked legal they would have been told they must switch off auto-delete. Lawyers aren't stupid they value their licence far more than their current job. I am highly doubtful there would be any written advice that said anything other than, if in doubt save.
even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again.
Eh, utterly impractical but I still think there should be a way to "jail" corporations. Easy - "Your offices are closed for the duration of the sentence. Your systems are shut down for the duration. Automatic payments set up in advance can continue as long as there are funds in your bank accounts, but your staff will not be monitoring them. You can appoint someone external to the organization to take care of some obligations."
Survivable as a business for short enough sentences (effectively comparable to a devastating ransomware attack), but mighty painful and anyone involved will absolutely feel the wrath of ownership/shareholders.
I would say: fire the C level executives, with no severance. At the same time halt all stock trading.
Have the top officers who remain put their division on the auction block to the highest bidder, on a sold twice system, best deal wins. That is the company as a whole is sold, in parallel all divisions are sold separately: then add up the different bids, and whoever paid more: whole company vs all the individual departments separate wins. Although there are conflicts of interests, I think the officers who remain should both be allowed to bid, and also consult to other bidders: but the consults must be in public as are their bids.
Shareholders are treated as if the company is bankrupt: government fines, remaining employees, banks, and then the lawyers all get paid. If there is money left over shareholders get it.
I believe the best penalty for a big company is really to be broken up. It doesn't penalize the people working on the company or its clients, since the business continue, but it does penalize the management and board of the company for their misbehavior.
Except if the broken up companies then start trimming staff because of the uncertainty of operating with corporate daddy any more. What was a stable company now becomes unstable and the ultimately, it is the employees that suffer
Would you rather have an unstable company or an unstable industry, or even an unstable society if certain abuses go unchecked for long enough? And being without a job is less painful when there are more companies competing with each other and incentivized to innovate and therefore grow.
I was just pointing out that at the end of the day, it is the employees that pay the price for the leadership being asshats.
I want people that dictate that a company does evil to pay the same price as if they were doing the same thing without the corporate shield. If felons lose the right to vote and are prevented from other rights afforded to other citizens, then corporate felons should also lose rights like never being able to lead a company, pay fines, as well as possibly being a guest of the state.
This would be disproportionately used as a tool against extremely small corporations without the budget to fight the "sentence" or weather out even a short shutdown.
> If true even a one or two day prison sentence for 5 or 6 Googlers would make sure this never happened again.
A default judgement in favor of the government on the underlying antitrust case would be far more effective, and is actually a potential (though extreme) remedy (requiring neither indictment, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, or involvement of a jury) if willful failure to preserve evidence is found.
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.
Just let the plaintiff or prosecuter decide what evidence they would have liked to find and instruct the jury to assume it was found. This would never happen again anywhere.
> Just let the plaintiff or prosecuter decide what evidence they would have liked to find and instruct the jury to assume it was found.
We already have a form of that (and more). Rule 37(e) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, permitting a court, when finding intentional destruction of electronic evidence that should have been preserved, to presume, and/or instruct the jury to presume, that the evidence was adverse to the jury or to summarily dismiss the claim or enter a default judgement (depending on which side destroyed the evidence).
Literally, the court can decide “You destroyed evidence, you lose the case, game over”.
This seems like some insane government overreach, though. Like, make the penalties for destroying evidence super steep and criminally liable sure, but it seems pretty wild that you could be convicted of a crime without evidence. In that case, the government has an incentive to destroy evidence and its paper trail.
How would the government go about destroying evidence in a defendant's possession?
(If you mean "Has the government failed to meet its burden of disclosure regarding evidence in its possession:" yes, it occasionally happens. The significant incentive against it is that it's immediate grounds for a mistrial and incredibly embarrassing to a prosecutor's office that has it happen on their watch).
I don't want to alarm you but (a) it's definitely possible to be convicted of a crime without evidence and (b) the only things stopping "the government" fabricating evidence are the government officials themselves.
The issue here is that companies are not generally required to retain a records indefinitely, and if something was deleted as part of a standard retention policy (instead of specifically because of its contents) the normal "assume the worst" policy doesn't apply. Which is, I think, why lawyers are excited about a default of having a short retention period.
On the other hand, litigation generally comes with needing to put your deletion policy on hold, and it sounds like that didn't happen here?
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.
Companies can't get rid of chat tools anymore than previous bureaucracies could stop using paper. Operating at current scale requires digital communication. If they tried to cut that off, they'd discover that things stopped working. Twitter gave us an example of that just this week: https://www.platformer.news/p/new-cracks-emerge-in-elon-musk...
True, but saving paper was a lot more work. Most paper memos got read and put into the trash as you didn't have space to save it. Even if there wasn't a review everything saved policy you still did just because it was sitting in your office until you got rid of it. Of course when something did have to be saved you gave it to your secretary to file and wouldn't review it latter to see if it should go, but if it stayed in your office it didn't last much longer than you needed it.
I mean, I grant the theoretical possibility. In the same way that they could in theory only meet in person. But I just provided you with a counterexample of that not actually happening. The reason people use things like Slack is because they're way more efficient than setting up meetings to discuss things.
So I think in the long term, a company like Google ruling out chat would be significantly handicapped vs their competitors in terms of information flow, response time, and ability to iterate.
> can be about something harmless but blown so out of proportion in court.
That's the entire point of a court, to find correct context and proportion.
Judges are not idiots and they don't like being mislead. If you blow things out of proportion, and your opponents can put up a counterargument, it will cost you.
This site is crazy. I get downvoted for posting insurance company training regarding chat and get downvoted. I guess you all just run a company without worrying about having insurance? Are you people who downvoted in IT and the liaison with the insurance company?
I was working there when this happened, and I definitely remember thinking, "Well, no point in writing a detailed email full of information that will be useful in the future, because in 30 days it'll be gone anyway."
Even more frustrating was finding myself in a situation where I remembered an old email that would be enormously helpful, either because of the information in it, or because I could reuse the bulk of something I had invested a lot of effort into writing, and knowing that this work was gone forever.
I tried that for a while, but eventually got a message from someone nose-bleedingly high up along the lines of, “If you’re reading this, you’re one of a very small number of employees who has marked more than X% of their mail as retain-indefinitely.” It was obvious they were reluctant to go on record telling us to knock it off, but that was the clear implication.
Huh, TIL. When did this happen? I left in January 2022. Also, perhaps the amount of mailing lists I was subscribed to (the messages of which I didn't retain unless they mentioned me) outweighed the messages that mentioned me. I could see running into an issue if you retained literally every message in your inbox.
> You have a contact you remember who emailed you three years about a thing... you'll never find them again.
Same problem. So, I asked the company IT staff, what is the recommended solution? The answer was "oh, just create a folder on your network drive, and drag-and-drop the .MSG files into there."
This answer was apparently vetted by the same company lawyers that came up with the 2 year retention policy in the first place. I don't have the courage to confirm this, but I really would like to ask them what the point of all this even is.
If you make a personal copy it's not in the email system, and they can reasonably say they couldn't find it, since they aren't going to search everyone's desktops for errant emails.
I understood that the goal is to reduce keyword hits during discovery therefore making the action active rather than passive is a favorable balance of concerns.
It's very annoying. I regularly get a technical question from someone and answer it in a detailed back and forth where we debug. Then I realize history was off, turn history on, and then copy paste hundreds of lines of conversation back into the same chat window so it doesn't disappear in 24 hours.
One of many completely dysfunctional things I hated in my short stint there not long ago. Just an incredibly employee-hostile setting for doing remote work.
I really despise auto-delete policies. Obviously, because of the inconvenience and all the context/history/search capability you lose, but also because it's addressing the problem the wrong way. Rather than be accountable for your actions, the company would rather create a system to circumvent the law and sweep the evidence under the rug. Creates a terrible incentive structure. It goes to show that the company is run by lawyers.
Bezos had a great bit he would always say at all hands about this kind of stuff:
"Look, we are a large corporation. We deserve to be inspected. It’s going to happen. Don’t take it personally. Because when you take it personally, you start to do things that are counterproductive.”
"There’s only one way to handle it, and that is that we have to conduct ourselves in such a way that when we are scrutinized, we pass with flying colors.”
That’s all well and good. I still think the quote stands on its own as a great philosophy for how to approach scrutiny as a large business. Philosophy and execution are separate!
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 conversations that way, which will probably also get regulated at some point. Company lawyers are always the “nanana I’m not touching you!” type where they just try to come up with some new cute way to skirt laws and it doesn’t actually work, but I guess they can keep doing illegal things for a few years until judges catch up when them.
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!
> if first the politicians, lawmakers, and bureaucrats were all held to the same standard
Then you will have engineered a world free of compromise. Every meeting becomes posturing, because every proposed concession becomes a liability before it can be considered by the other side. (And you know they're similarly constrained.)
We're now learning the Cuban missile crisis was not resolved through blind boldness, but through the sort of open dialogue only possible over covert channels [1][2].
This seems really interesting to me. The US Constitution was only able to come about due to closed door discussion and debate, and that was one of the most positive outcomes in history for liberal democracy.
There are legitimate arguments for open discussions and records, but they can absolutely lead to a stifling of compromise and spur polarization.
True, but the practical reality parallels the regulations mentioned above: the rules are not being enforced fully, and there do not appear to be enough real-world consequences to prevent individuals from breaking them.
Is there specific government meeting or record you have in mind, that legally should have been public, but isn't?
Generally we have enough proof of politicians doing/saying deplorable things. We don't have enough voters punishing their politicians for misbehaviour.
I’m more surprised it’s put in a “this is wild” light. This is in the same direction as declaring gifts you receive from your clients, or reporting the expenses of these lunches you’re having in a business setting, along who were there and how much you paid for them.
My take on this is, if it’s a business act (a task you did on company time, with company money) it shouldn’t be in a grey “we were just chatting” area and you should be able to report to your company what you did and justify the money spent.
I wouldn’t expect full recordings, but at least enough to explain why there was a meeting in the first place and what was discussed. Now I totally understand the SEC wanting more, but they’re probably doing so to move the window and not actually expecting it goes through.
It'll just end up with mandatory RTO and end of WFH. It's kinda funny how enlightened WFH HNers in this topic don't realize that they're effectively (in WFH case) defending recording of every private workplace conversation forever so it can bi sifted through by lawyers, HR and compliance auditors for any kind of wrongdoing.
It's a precedent workplace surveillance in total scale just to hunt for (I quote) "shady shit".
It's a bit weird that this is even a thing given Google's ecosystem supports retention and litigation holds - technology acquired through buying Postini iirc.
2) Violate an explicit court order by automatically deleting all your incriminating documents.
3) Blame thousands of unaware individual contributors for not each manually blocking << 1% of the illegal deletions, per directions that went straight to their corporate mailing list filter’s trash can.
4) Cite this case as precedent, and demand whatever slap on the wrist Google is about to receive.
1.5) Buy insurance to pay whatever that fine works out to.
Seems like it simply supports the DoJ's case that they're acting as a trust, if they simply bought a $625M competitor to completely dissolve its product.
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.).
Schmidt doesn't get shit for saying true things. He gets shit for being a rich hypocritical asshole. At the time he was spouting his holier-than-thou bullshit, he was colluding with other high-tech firms (Apple, et al.) to suppress workers' salaries, and he was actively hiding the evidence of doing so. It came out in court anyway and Google was part of a half-billion dollar settlement over the matter.
Eric Schmidt is not some misunderstood truth-sayer. He's a crook and a hypocrite and the things he says are received poorly because he's an elitist who's made his $25,000,000,000 fortune punching down.
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).
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.
When he says "well behaved" he surely means in the computing sense of being predictable and having the range of his behaviours to be well known. Rather than the more common interpretation of "generally morally upstanding"?
The latter. Just Ctrl + F type "behaved" and you'll see. The whole exchange is quite an interesting read. (And that conversation took place in 2011, btw.)
I believe Sundar got in trouble for labelling every single email "confidential attorney client privilege" and cc'ing the legal team so that none of what he says would be released in discovery.
> Also, it seems arbitrary that OTR chat should be recorded but hallway conversations and phonecalls are ok to delete…
If you regularly create records of conversations and phone calls, evidence preservation rules apply to those records as well; you cannot delete them, either.
The fact that no records are usually made in the first place and that the only evidence of the content of such conversations is witness testimony not records means that evidence preservations laws don’t apply (but if you tamper with the witnesses, that is a fairly serious offense.)
> harmless written word is notoriously easy to quote out of context and otherwise use "against you" in court.
Do you believe lawyers and judges are unfamiliar with this issue?
Like their entire lives are spent reviewing documents, letters and email. They invented the concept of Disclosure before computers existed, so that Defence can rebut or put proper context to any argument that will be made by prosecution.
> Do you believe lawyers and judges are unfamiliar with this issue?
They are absolutely familiar with this issue and if you've ever been in any legal case, they'll gleefully exploit every small word to make you look like the biggest criminal rapist in the world and maximize the time you spent in jail.
Go read why exactly do we support Signal and other E2E encrypted messengers. Establishing precedent that every word you say while WFH can be used against you for decades is problematic no matter how much you hate Google.
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.
Google thinks they are above the law and bigger and more powerful than the US government. It will be interesting to see if the courts throw the book at Google for directly disobeying them and assert themselves as having control or if they'll roll over and confirm Google as our unelected King.
As an ex-Googler ... That auto-delete policy was extremely annoying.
And even if we turned it off, it only changed from a 24 hour deletion to something like 30 days. The chats certainly wouldn't be kept permanently.
Corporate data "retention" policies are entirely intended to avoid future legal "discovery." My understanding is that policies like Google's are considered "best practices". For example, my current employer deletes Slack messages after 90 days for the same reason. It is also extremely annoying.
My current employer even deletes Google Docs after something like 180 days unless they are put into special folders.
> All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had “put a legal hold in place” that “suspends auto-deletion.”
...then you better not be auto-deleting things for the next 3 years.
The lawsuit details that the language Google used when telling the DOJ what they were protecting. Hangouts is included in that language.
Google also revised their retention policies for chats not once, but _twice_ during the litigation, but somehow no-one thought that maybe deleting the chats should be mentioned to the US government.
Well it would be funny if their counterargument is that "Hangouts" was a specific thing and the OTR chats were actually on one of that company's 600 other chat products.
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
Because total surveillance has never been goal or precedent.
The legal profession has always understood that people act differently when they speak and when they write.
It is unrealistic to hold people accountable to every mis-spoken word, mistake or dumb thing they have said in spur of the moment. If I ask someone 'how long will X take' and they must answer on the spot, I do not expect an accurate answer.
When you are writing, you have a chance to think through what you are saying. You should also be aware that these words could be read in 1 hour or in 1 day, and they still need to be understood correctly. You could be help accountable for the promises, whether legally, or informally by friends and family.
That's why the law recognizes the superiority of written versus verbal agreements.
That sounds like a reasonable distinction between verbal and written as in email or memo, but chat is then in a grey area. Chat is used more often than not in a casual conversational way that does not promote a lot of thinking before writing.
In times of remote work and working from home, there's no meaningful difference between recording all conversation in office and retaining all private chats.
> 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?
The policy is if you are doing something illegal than you must keep all records of it. It is also that once your are sued you have to immediately stop all efforts to delete related conversations. I know my company often has to go in and turn off all automated deletes for a short time (a couple days?) while the lawyers figure out what keywords and people matter, then just keywords and people are locked down. Then more individual review of what remains to decide what is relevant, where if there is any doubt at all it is relevant and isn't deleted. Cases/investigations can last for years.
Same reason why 24/7 surveillance of everything you do in your life is destructive for society.
When you're a "company employee" for at least third of your life you're still human that deserves some privacy away from spying eyes of HR, lawyers and government looking for something you did wrong.
(Is this really so hard to understand? Is that something we from ex-socialist totalitarian regimes really understand?)
> 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.
Yes, there are laws about preserving evidence and records. However, these laws haven't been updated to reflect how office communication has changed over the years. No one would propose, circa 1950, that companies must record every conversation between two people in the office for regulatory compliance or lawsuit discovery, etc. purposes.
But effectively, that's what retention requirements for chat messages amount to.
What is the principled policy argument (ignoring practicality) for requiring retention of chat messages, but not requiring every employee to wear a body camera that permanently records every work-related interaction they have IRL?
> Yes, there are laws about preserving evidence and records. However, these laws haven’t been updated to reflect how office communication has changed over the years.
Yes, they have.
> No one would propose, circa 1950, that companies must record every conversation between two people in the office for regulatory compliance or lawsuit discovery, etc. purposes.
No one proposes the digital equivalent, only that once a record is created (which online chats inherently do in the course of executing them), the record be preserved. Which, in the 1950s, is exactly the rule that applied to anything that a record was created of.
> But effectively, that’s what retention requirements for chat messages amount to.
No, its not.
> What is the principled policy argument (ignoring practicality) for requiring retention of chat messages, but not requiring every employee to wear a body camera that permanently records every work-related interaction they have IRL?
The principled policy argument is that once records are created, deleting them when the conditions for a litigation hold exists is destruction of things known to be evidence in current or anticipated litigation, and that allowing parties to selectively destroy evidence with knowledge and reasonable anticipation of litigation unreasobably obstructs the discovery of truth the the legal process.
Chats are in no way special with regard to this argument.
Making everyone wear body cams: they weren't previously using body cams, you have to spend $ to buy them, the cams will capture me while using the washroom.
Stopping the deletion of chats: an IT person has to toggle a setting.
It feels pretty different to me! To roll with your 1950s analogy, it feels a lot more like the office secretaries being told that instead of shredding inter-office memos, they have to hold on to them.
I realize you said ignoring practicality...but that seems like a weird constraint to add. Bureaucracies run through paperwork, so capturing emails and DMs are often sufficient, while being much less invasive and cheaper.
> To roll with your 1950s analogy, it feels a lot more like the office secretaries being told that instead of shredding inter-office memos, they have to hold on to them.
There are still interoffice memos in a modern office - they're called emails. But in 1950, if you wanted to just ask a quick question of your colleague Joe, you'd walk over to his office and ask him verbally. Regulators understood that these sorts of interaction happen all the time, are a natural part of business, and didn't try to require that records of these be documented or retained.
Today, if you want to ask a quick question of your colleague Joe (who might be in a different state), you just send him a message on Slack. And the same regulations originally written for interoffice memos in the 1950s require that your Slack messages be retained. The same regulations now cover a much broader range of types of communication and business interactions than they were ever intended to.
Rather, the requirement is not equivalent to a requirement to wear a body camera, but instead to a requirement that if you wear and have actively recording a body camera, you can’t destroy the recording if it is relevant to a subject of reasonably anticipated, or actually in progress, litigation.
The point is that we use written communication a lot more in a modern (especially remote) office than we did in 1950, and for a much broader range of purposes and interactions than when the regulations requiring records retention were written.
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.
What’s the penalty for this? The article says “sanction”, but that probably doesn’t mean “bar domestic companies and the US government from doing business with them”.
Presumably, the punishment has to be worse than what would happen if the documents proved all of the DOJ’s allegations, or there would be no incentive to obey subpoenas. (Note that, while unrealistically harsh, such a policy is probably still too lax: Deleting the documents might be the best course of action, assuming they contain shady shit the DOJ hadn’t thought of. Personal jail time for everyone above the responsible party in the org chart might make sense, especially if it included the board of directors.)
Why on earth would anyone from Google want to break the law and try to destroy evidence on behalf of Google? I highly doubt this happened the way that this article claims it happened. Google has hundreds of thousands of employees, the idea that there's a group of employees that are willing to go to jail on behalf of the company over something that is easily detected is ridiculous.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only evil to a capitalist is loss of capital. The "don't be evil" motto still applies. Just not the way that you're accustomed to reading it.
I'm surprised you're getting downvoted given the amount of snark in other comments. Or is the directness the part we're not supposed to be saying out loud?
the people who can downvote on this site all have remarkably similar political/ethical positions, or it is my impression at least that is the case. really makes you think huh
As far as I know, you can downvote when you have 500 karma. But it is interesting that the people with that amount seem to run in the bootstraps go brrrr crowd, eh?
You can criticize a person, you can criticize a company, but criticizing capitalism itself is never popular here. I've been called a communist for literally quoting Adam Smith.
I suppose it never occurred to you that the "issue" could be an example of a battle in a culture war.
The culture here is capitalism. Capitalism is a worship of capital and its acquisition by any means. Including pushing for new fuels that give 25% of people cancer, or by breaking unions that are trying to prevent East Palestines, or by classifying people as "independent contractors" to avoid paying for benefits, or by swallowing up competition, or by then attempting to thwart a costly antitrust lawsuit by "accidentally" losing evidence.
Google's culture was "don't be evil", and then capitalism happened (see above) and we get the parent remark: "the only evil to a capitalist is loss of capital"
Now what was it you were saying about a dress code?
What economic system do you think this wouldn't happen under?
I'd like to point out that it was specifically the Whitehouse, under Biden, which withdrew the ability of train unions to negotiate via strike. That isn't capitalism. That was an administration making a choice because they felt additional grocery store shortages would hurt their polling numbers. That wasn't the free market - that was Government Intervention.
And why is it that gigs where people are ICs are desirable? Why do so many people work for Uber? If it's a bad gig, why take it? I've talked to a lot of Uber drivers and they like it - they can work as much or as little as they want and adapt their driving to their income needs. That doesn't sound like "capitalism".
Capitalism, as you use it here, might as well be Satan. Lost your lunch? That was Satan. Tripped on the way to school? Satan again. It's everywhere, it's the thing always at fault, no further explanation needed. It's a word that says "stop thinking, we have the cause of the problem - it's Capitalism".
"Culture war" isn't just "disagreements", it's disagreements about things that only exist in the realm of culture, e.g. saggy pants or watching people of the same gender kiss on TV.
Economics, in fact, plays a central role here, given the profit motive that, to the bad actors, justifies these actions despite their illegality.
> A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices.[1] It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values.
They criticized Google for holding a value they perceived to be at odds with the underlying economic system.
During a discussion of said company's defiance of a federal judge, such a critique seems pertinent to me!
We have continually observed the most powerful actors in our system abusing it in consistent ways: cornering markets, becoming monopolies, bullying smaller companies, constructing walled gardens, diminishing the concept of consumer ownership, etc.
I think we ought to allow comments like theirs in discussions like this.
Where in that definition do you propose governance comes in? Do you think culture is governable? To me, culture lies outside the scope of governance entirely -- it's literally just what people do to express themselves and the ways they like to spend their time.
> Societal values
Notice it doesn't say economic or material values.
Was their practice of direct democracy an important part of ancient Greek culture? (Yes! And it's Republic forms were also part of their culture!)
Does the age of monarchy still have impacts on the UK? My imported gin still says "By Order of Her Majesty" on it. "God save the Queen" (or now King) is, intrinsically, part of UK culture.
> values, beliefs, and practices
That includes practices of law keeping, beliefs in how the law is executed, altered and enshrined, etc.
In the US specifically, the founding fathers wrote _at length_ on capitalism, the free market, and how communal economic systems (they were writing prior to Marx) didn't scale. Our society is built on capitalism, through and through.
> The updated version of Google’s code of conduct still retains one reference to the company’s unofficial motto—the final line of the document is still: “And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”
Eh, I'd identify as a capitalist and there are definitely lots of evil things far worse than loss of capital. Capitalism need not imply anarchy or surrendering our moral compass.
According to far too many, a corporation's sole duty is to the enrichment of its shareholders. I speak not of an ideal capitalism, but of capitalism as it is practiced.
Oh, I agree that that's what corporations should be doing -- I just trust my government to give them laws and regulations to follow, to steer the lumbering economic engine to the goals that we as society value. (I also tend to think that companies that people think are good tend to last and have broad social support, so doing good does have merits even to bloodthirsty capitalists).
If companies break those laws or regulations, the penalties should be extremely steep (I imagine we probably agree on this bit, but let me know if not).
The way I feel about people who choose to work at Meta is how I'm beginning to feel about those coming onboard lately with Google. Strikes me as nothing like the rosy-principled place it set out to be in the 'do no evil' days.
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'.)
Unfortunately, your experience differs in ways that don't apply categorically to the points I made from my perspective and experience.
We have hooks into the fleet of endpoints (corporate with some 10k BYODs), servers, and various vendor apps. This is realized by data legal provides reduced to a boolean per user because there's no need to convey excess detail. When an employee visits Help Desk, they are limited by the possible actions HD can take if they are under a legal hold. The same applies to certain OS upgrades, whether HD or DIY. It would be impossible to manage VDI or "throwaway" servers at scale without a centralized legal hold inquiry API.
Google has (or had) a far greater corporate tech staff / employee ratio in the industry than similar companies, so there's no excuse for them not to have a comprehensive legal hold program throughout their technical organization.
Were you with your company when they became large enough to worry about legal holds? If so, was there a conversation about the transition you were privy to?
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.
Good point; I was trying to talk about the standard company wide training on communication and privilege. Even though I worked in a relatively legally tricky area, the only training I got on privilege was company-level, and I was assuming (incorrectly apparently) that that was how it worked throughout the company.
The response here further supplements the argument that Googlers (and ex-Googlers apparently) care more about winning the debate they can see (even if they’re fundamentally wrong as evidence showed here) instead of trying to imagine a life after Search.
As a taxpayer and Google shareholder, I definitely want technical talent diverted into making real products versus playing epistemic games with the DOJ or finding new creative ways to subvert discovery. We wasted enough fighting Microsoft, we don’t need to do it again just because Googlers think they’re better.
My understanding is that adding a lawyer to a conversation isn't sufficient to shield it from discovery. Instead you actually need to (a) be asking a lawyer for legal advice, (b) not cc or otherwise share with anyone who does not need that advice, and (c) not include unrelated matters. When I've written things that actually needed to be privileged I would start a separate email, address it only to the lawyer and specific people who also needed to know the advice, and keep the thread carefully on topic.
When you're not asking for particular legal advice about a particular legal problem, CCing a lawyer doesn't result in your communication being protected by layer-client privilege.
Communications with your lawyer are privileged. Communications with other people are not (necessarily) privileged. By looping in the lawyer it creates a pretext (that probably won't hold up) for claiming it is privileged communication.
Interesting. I just went to a meeting where my presence meant there could be no privileged communication even though the lawyer's client was also my client and they had requested my attendance.
Right. From the Ars article it seemed that it was Google employees looping in Google lawyers while communicating with each other, not Google employees looping in the lawyers while also talking with third parties. So more like if I and a colleague both go to legal to hold a conversation just to gain the benefit of their presence to call it privileged. But if the lawyer is just sitting there working through a book of sudoku puzzles, then it's probably not really a valid claim of privilege.
From the Ars article:
> In 2016, Google instructed employees to create artificial indicia of privilege for all written communications related to revenue-share agreements and Mobile Application Distribution Agreements (MADAs), the exclusionary agreements at the heart of this action. Google reiterated those instructions after the Department of Justice issued its first Civil Investigative Demand in the investigation preceding this case. The Court should, therefore, sanction Google for its deliberate and deceptive misuse of the attorney-client privilege and order the company to produce, unredacted, all emails between non-attorneys where included in-house counsel did not bother to reply, indicating that any request for legal advice was most likely a pretext.
lol this checks out, but justice department cannot assert that companies are suppose to keep all internet conversations indefinitely. No precedence for that so they are just blowing smoke here huffing and puffing because they have zero evidence and that must be the defendant's fault.
This was a shrewd move on Google's part because certainly the cost of destroying evidence will be significantly lower than any smoking gun that might have been said over chat.
Why would good in mid 2019 know it had to save chat data for use in a lawsuit not filed for over another year? And why would such a lawsuit require saving all chats between everyone? Should google also have started video recording all in person meetings or stopped throwing out any trash in case there was something in those bins too?
> Google’s duty to preserve documents began when it reasonably anticipated litigation. According to the company’s privilege logs, beginning as early as May 2019, Google began withholding materials “compiled in connection with ongoing DOJ investigation.” The United States then issued its first Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to Google on August 30, 2019, and issued two subsequent CIDs in October 2019.
If I'm reading this right- they allege that Google knew because they had already began withholding some materials and were issued 3 CIDs.
I think it is completely absurd that the government let companies get away with the policy of deleting messages. Any public and/or large enough company should be required to keep all communications, internal and external, for at least a decade. These companies are required to respond to the public. In todays world the only reason for them not to keep records is to evade responsibility for whatever they're doing wrong.
https://ia902501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22...
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appearing on CNBC once said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
If Google is not doing anything wrong, then why not give the Government what it is are asking for and let justice prevail.
Google collects and surveils internet users' conversations on a mass scale without a subpoena, for whatever purpose(s) it chooses, for profit. To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare, that's apparently acceptable. However when the Government subpoenas Google for Google's conversations, for the sole purpose of determining whether Google is complying with the law, Google resists.
Personal data mining on billions of people. No problem. Monitoring employees to catch leakers and whistleblowers. Can do. Saving employee chats to satisty document requests from the Government. Too time-consuming and burdensome!
There is perhaps no company in the world better equipped to comb through peoples' conversations.