Google destroyed evidence for antitrust battle, Feds complain The US Department of Justice (DoJ) asked the judge hearing its antitrust case against Google to sanction the search advertising giant for destruction of evidence. The DoJ, along with 11 states, sued Google back in October, 2020, alleging [PDF] at the time that the internet titan has unlawfully monopolized the search market …
Going through years of chat messages of 100k employees looking for anticompetitive behaviour... If I was a DoJ employee, I'd be grateful to be spared the task. That said, if there is a litigation hold on the emails of an employee, it stands to reason that the chat messages should be on hold as well, right? I'm sure they also delete the email after a while by default. Then again, if the employees were careful to hide any shady business in unrecorded chat messages, it only means that they'd have otherwise hidden their shady business in unrecorded meetings. I can't imagine the DoJ ordering Google to record every meeting forever just in case there is dirt in them.
And yet they hold on to everything anyone who had a Google account (or did not) wrote or searched for, forever...
Funny how that works..
Google defaulted most chat sessions to 'history-off,
I'm sure this setting exists in Android and Chrome settings, with the same defaults. Or it could be a good remedy given AlphaGoo already has this capability, and values it as a privacy tool.
"Then again, if the employees were careful to hide any shady business in unrecorded chat messages, it only means that they'd have otherwise hidden their shady business in unrecorded meetings."
That's possible, but the other possibility is that they used chat because that's the typical system* and didn't take any action either to preserve or to hide their messages, allowing Google to decide what to do with them. Had Google had a retention policy that kept them, the messages could still have been there. This is more likely to be the case when the employees are implementing something the company knows is illegal but the employees don't know, whereas employees doing something they know could land them with a criminal charge would likely be more careful with their comms.
* In one company at which I worked as a student, so many systems were set to send emails to everybody, including many people who not only didn't care about what they said, but also wouldn't even have understood what they said, that email was no longer a reliable way to communicate with anyone. You could send an email and the people who set up filters to eliminate enough of the junk would eventually see it, but even for them there was enough junk left over after filtration that they would only look at email infrequently. The internal chat system became the only way people tended to communicate with one another.
I'm reminded of my time at DEC in their later years (i.e. the less good era when Greasy Bob was in charge) where there was such a problem with managers marking literally everything as urgent while being absolutely deaf to reasonable requests to tone it down a bit that someone dreamt up the strategy of abbreviating it to "U" and designating its actual urgency by the number of Us at the start of the subject. You can guess how that went: the managers immediately used the company's entire supply of Us and the cost of replacing them was so much that they went bust. True story (well, mostly).
IME it was overused to the point where anything flagged/tagged "urgent" (I forget if All-In-1 had that or if it was just in the subject; I think the latter, but it's been nearly 30 years), and particularly the "UUUUU:" prefix as was their new policy, was automatically and unconsciously downgraded to junk. I'd read everything else first.
The same managers would also print literally everything but would refuse to ever put fresh paper in the printer and instead just wander off and submit another copy or three for printing. We had one of those huge floor-standing things with a Vax processor whose capacity for prodigious output was evidently mostly used to print off reams of trivial emails. Number of times I'd go to collect my two sheets of something actually meaningful from a 3-4" stack of uncollected memos about obviously archive-worthy stuff like "FYI: the owner of the blue Cavalier has left their headlights on"...
Years ago, and before email was a big thing, I was in charge of turfing a load of people out of their offices when the company went open plan. One engineer insisted that he needed all five of his four-drawer filing cabinets, so I started going through them. Every single document he'd ever received was carefully filed away. Among them were meeting invites from long-finished projects and endless company notifications about org-changes, Christmas holiday dates, car-parking changes, people retiring, etc. Some of them were over ten years old but he still got very annoyed when I told him that most of it was junk but he could keep whatever fitted in a 2-drawer ped.
Everybody is ignoring the fact that Google could have implemented a "legal retention" copy stream on any and all employee communication records required. In fact, as a company Google is an expert in the field. Also, The communication tools are highly likely to have been produced by Google so adding a "legal retention" function should have been easy. As easy as asking an accountant to count beans.
The UI features are no place to implement such a data retention requirement.
Throw the book at them, the big book.
Part of employee onboarding is data retention training. It's critical that you're not accidentally retaining data that could be used against Google in a lawsuit. All conversations must be stored in corporate systems designed to automatically delete. I seem to recall there being a tedious means to accelerate or pause deletion. It would be easy to delete a single conversation but not to preserve many discussion related to a topic.
I bet the DoJ would have fun going through the onboarding instructions, if they still exist. Maybe claims of having hired too many people were to justify deleting them.
You don't have to be evil to have that policy. There are good reasons for not hanging on to everything. I work at a university, so I have to think about the amount of effort required to sort through everything when we get a public records request. One case (that I thankfully wasn't involved in) involved a professor who was in a messy divorce. His ex-wife filed a public records request for all of his email, which he'd packratted for years. It took forever to sort through it all. I'm not sure if she was looking for evidence of infidelity or if it was just to force all the extra work on him. (Punitive records requests are definitely a thing.)
My previous employer had an autoenforced 90-day email retention policy; the only way to evade it was to save emails as files. Always seemed suspicious for a real-estate company - every deal would take longer than that!
Surely there was some corporate-level system for preserving lawsuit-relevant email. But if it was turned on when the potential lawsuit was announced, that would likely be at least 6 months after the emails were written - "Sorry, your honor, those messages were deleted months ago."
All they had to do is purge old records on a semi random basis then back up a rolling portion of the entire lot every day with no message timestamps, so everything would be there in the backups..... somewhere. When DoJ does the data disclosure request Google ships them a few shipping containers of disks, or better still obsolete tapes and invites the DoJ to access and deduplicate it all.
This where it would be useful to have a warehouse full of obsolete disk and tape drives.
I do think the DoJ is doing a major fishing operation -- like many posters they've prejudged the issue and are casting around for evidence to support their position. They have tools for this -- "destroying evidence" and "lying to the Feds" -- charges that should attract the attention of ordinary people because they're used when the Feds don't have a case they can prove.
That doesn't really work, legally. You have to have a schedule and stick to it. *If* you purge regularly on a schedule and someone asks for the data later you're off the hook. But if you suddenly start deleting stuff because you think a lawsuit is coming, you're in trouble.
I had assumed that the rise in bling-y IRC in corporate communications was to circumvent the email retention rules outlined in Sorbanes Oxley.
It seems the wily legislatures hadn't heard of chat or even usenet.
I remember when the act passed, the CEO of Sun gave an internal radio talk on the importance of knowing what your management would have wanted you to do, thus just do it and don't put it in an email. Great times...
Most companies don't know how to handle chat. We are going thought this now, realizing that chat message "are not" covered by our legal retention settings. It is an oversight that is wide spread across many businesses. With Teams it even gets weirder. If you set your teams chat to 15 days but your email retention is 5 years, teams stores chat history in a hidden folder in the users email. So the chats are retained for 5 years and ARE discoverable! This could be an unpleasant surprise to the Corporate Council.
If the government can prove that Google did indeed insttruct its employees to talk about matters related to how the company reacts to competition by voice, which is not recorded, rather than E-mail, which is retained for evidentiary use in antitrust proceedings, from that point on it should be a slam dunk to find Google guilty of whatever antitrust offence the government might claim it has engaged in.
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