> 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.
Deciding that (and if it's worth sanctions if Google is wrong) is literally what's being asked of the judge.
To me, a slack message or chat message is the digital equivalent to me going to your desk or talking to you at lunch in person.
Now we live in a digital world where because we can, we are now being told to record. How would this be any different than the courts demanding that all conversations be recorded via audio recording when not using a chat application.
I think the fair trade off is “if i have the document, then I will produce it” and a default policy of delete after x time would be tested no different than if you or I had a conversation in person.
To some people, posting on a public facebook wall is likewise the digital equivalent of talking to someone at lunch in person. Where is the line?
>I think the fair trade off is “if i have the document, then I will produce it” and a default policy of delete after x time would be tested no different than if you or I had a conversation in person.
The purpose is to get the truth of the dispute, not prevent liability for people acting badly. Your purpose for not having courts see evidence of wrongdoing is so that what, things are better for the wrongdoers? If your argument is feasibility or removing the recording element at all, I'd understand, but the thing is already recorded.
>Now we live in a digital world where because we can, we are now being told to record. How would this be any different than the courts demanding that all conversations be recorded via audio recording when not using a chat application.
It'd be different because courts aren't demanding the conversations be recorded at all; that's just the way things are working. If you worked at a company where all conversations are recorded and you're on camera all the time, you'd have to preserve those too.
Something about your reply seems to indicate the topic is about self cleaning messages, which is under question by the courts of deleting evidence.
Even the words utter in a room linger some time after they leave my lips. Should we be told to install acoustic tiles that let the words echo for the ages so the courts can determine the truth?
> The purpose is to get the truth of the dispute, not prevent liability for people acting badly. Your purpose for not having courts see evidence of wrongdoing is so that what, things are better for the wrongdoers? If your argument is feasibility or removing the recording element at all, I'd understand, but the thing is already recorded.
The purpose of not recording everything is to allow businesses (read: the people within them) to function efficiently without having to worry that anything and everything they say could be dragged into the record on a lawsuit. Also to encourage people to put problems on the record, paradoxically.
I work remotely, meaning face-to-face conversations are out of the question. I'm rapidly running out of ways to communicate that aren't on the record, which poses a communication problem for the business and inhibits dealing with problems that could lead to a lawsuit.
In a world where chats aren't part of the eternal record, I can pop in and say "hey, such and such feature seems like it has a security/privacy risk, we should take a look at that". The communication is valuable, and the business is now aware of the problem.
In a world with eternal chat records, nobody wants me to point that out unless we are ready to deal with it immediately. If I point it out, the business schedules it to be handled in a quarter or two, and they get hacked in the meantime then my chat message is on the record as evidence that the business was aware of the problem and "did nothing". Everyone would prefer that I had said nothing, because the business' liability is diminished if they can say they were unaware of the problem.
The underlying reality here is that business do not want their problems on public record, and will encourage their employees to communicate using non-recorded means or, failing that, to not communicate at all. It would be legally preferable to ship a product full of issues the business is unaware of than to ship a product with a single issue that the business is on record knowing about.
Requiring recording of all communications just encourages the business to not communicate internally, leading to the exact same problems recording was supposed to prevent.
Our legal system does not reward recording communications in the least, it actively penalizes doing so. We're trying to strong arm businesses into doing something against their own best interests, and I'm doubtful that's a productive line of action.
Zoom? Phone calls? You choose to use a recorded form of communication, but there are options. That said, if your goal is to intentionally hide information from use in a future lawsuit, there are easier ways to decrease your business's liability that don't run the same risks.
> If I point it out, the business schedules it to be handled in a quarter or two, and they get hacked in the meantime then my chat message is on the record as evidence that the business was aware of the problem and "did nothing".
You example about nobody wanting you to point this out because that creates liability is an error. The liability arguably already exists because the business should have known of the issue and did not. A policy of not reporting security issues because they fear lawsuits makes things much worse, making it potentially rise to recklessness. So you not telling the company about it on purpose, if that's a part of the culture of the company, is likely worse than you telling the company and having them make a reasonable assessment of risk and resource allocation. That's not "doing nothing" from a legal standpoint. Whether their decision was reasonable under the circumstances is one thing but it's usually not random people on the street evaluating this.
By the way, this has nothing to do with chat. Why do you think many companies routinely do security evaluations? It's not because consumers care. If your example is true companies would do better to not have security at all.
Finally with this, even if it were better for the company not to report it would be worse for you not to report.
>Requiring recording of all communications just encourages the business to not communicate internally, leading to the exact same problems recording was supposed to prevent.
Courts don't do that, though. Businesses decide to use recorded communication, much the same way they did when the law was created and distance was an issue.
> It would be legally preferable to ship a product full of issues the business is unaware of than to ship a product with a single issue that the business is on record knowing about
That's not necessarily true, but even if it is it wouldn't be preferable from a commerce standpoint. This isn't business in a legal vacuum.
Chats, emails, zoom calls, in-person conversations, etc all make sense to be ephemeral. Official company documents published by HR, official specifications, advertisements, etc make sense to be kept long-term.
When you are having a conversation in person and you don't know it is being recorded, you have an expectation that it won't be recorded because that is the default. Do you have an expectation by default that your chat system, slack or whatever irc you use is not accessible by anyone ever again, once you close the client? I don't because that hasn't been the case for most chat clients ever.
This is what they think. In fact "posting on a public facebook wall" is equivalent to talking live on television.
https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
Slack literally stands for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. That's why it was built! It's explicitly meant to supersede talking at lunch with something recorded and searchable.
huge difference.
What if a chat program deleted the message exactly after the recipient read it?
What if a chat program never persisted messages to disk and only in memory?
Would companies be told not to ever power off machines?
You say this as if to illicite some sort of shock or disapproval from the reader but for me its the opposite.
Why shouldnt the permanent storage of all communications between companies the size of Google be mandated by law?
From my perspective this seems to be a net benefit for society.
That's a feature, not a bug.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/jassy-bezos-oth...
My company has a default auto-delete for our email Inbox. Yet, we have all been trained to retain the emails (by moving them to a folder) if notified of a relevant legal event. I don't know if in practice I have to manually save them or whether IT will just disable autodelete on my account. In any case, the message is clear: Autodelete is not permissible under such circumstances.
Sorry Google. Nice try.
It was framed as "saving work for people who have to review conversations" (lol)
My org wasn't well-managed, lot of nepotism, promoting people who couldn't organize to save their life, but were good company men, too good. They saw having to have history off as a status badge because they saw higher ups did.
They even would independently escalate it from there. Towards the end of my tenure, a couple of them acted like it was obvious and mandatory not to name people in meeting notes. Such a strange place.
Who specifically told you to turn off retention for all conversations?
The bitter lesson from 7 years there was people are tribal and protect their own, everywhere. People regressed the higher up they got and longer they were there.
It was the tip of the iceberg in terms of conduct you think managers would care about. I dealt with what happened by smiling and nodding, not taking the dare to tell HR, telling a non-direct manager exactly once, and leaving.
At the end of the day, it's just a good ol' boys club with everyone trying to just get through one more day. Questioning is complaining is lack of cooperation is not a team player.
Yes but only if they are their chats. Your chats are still used for your profiling.
In some countries, disregarding laws is a fellony.
Why? The facts quoted in the parent comment, namely that Google destroyed _potential_ evidence, are not in dispute. Google has never denied that it destroyed chats after anticipating litigation in 2019. Because, surprise, that's what it did. In violation of the federal rules, Google destroyed chats that should have been preserved for potential discovery. This is not a DOJ argument. It is a fact. DOJ may use this fact in its arguments.
We can verfiy this by looking at Google's latest response. If the parent comment's quote was a "DOJ argument" then Google should be countering it by denying it destroyed potential evidence. That is not what Google argues.
Google is arguing (a) the destruction was not an _intentional_ attempt to conceal information from the DOJ and (b) the information destroyed did not contain any _relevent_ evidence.^1
Of course it's impossible to resolve the issue presented by (b) because the information has been destroyed. Google is essentially saying, "Trust us, there wasn't anything relevant in those chats." The DOJ cannot "prove" the chats contained relevant evidence because it cannot see the chats; Google destroyed them.
Does this situation created by _Google destroying the chats_ play in Google's favour? What do readers think?
1. These quotes come from Google's latest response.^2 Italics added are mine.
"356. Plaintiffs seek to rewrite history in their contention that Google's long-time chats retention practices-of which they were on notice since the beginning of this litigation- evidence the purposeful "destruction" of evidence. DOJ Br. at 75-79. And, recycling arguments from their unsuccessful sanctions motion filed in Spring 2022 (see May 12, 2022, Minute Order), Plaintiffs spin instructions to Google employees to use care in their written communications into supposed "concealment" of evidence. DOJ Br. at 75-79. There is no basis, in fact or law, to impose sanctions on Google. Each of the Google witnesses who was questioned on these matters at trial confirmed that there was no intentional destruction of evidence, and no evidence was presented that could support the conclusion that Google concealed or destroyed relevant evidence with the intention of gaining some advantage in the litigation. Google has produced millions of documents, including all manner of formal business documents as well as more informal communications such as email, and there is no reason to believe that the record before the Court is anything less than complete."
"358. Far from supporting Plaintiffs' motion for sanctions related to Google's Chat retention policies, the trial testimony confirmed that the motion is without merit. In particular, there is no reason to believe that history-off chats created after notice of the DOJ investigation in 2019 and not otherwise preserved and produced contained material information of any significance to resolving Plaintiffs' claims. Nor is there any evidence that there was any intentional effort by Google to deprive Plaintiffs of the use of information in this litigation; after all, Google disclosed to Plaintiffs the very approach to chats preservation that they now challenge long before Plaintiffs filed their original motion. See ECF No. 529 at 7-17; ECF No. 576-1 at 1-2.16
359. Plaintiffs' proposed findings obfuscate these facts, and are designed to suggest- without supportive evidence, let alone actual proof-that some relevant information was lost."
2. https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22...
They didn't ask employees to destroy evidence but to avoid retaining evidence in the first place. Not leaving sensitive information in logs, backups etc is quite reasonable, even if it would have been useful to justice here.
> Chats at google by default have 24 hours of chat history. (That is, after 24 hours, the chat history is delelted.) You can opt in to having 30 days of chat history instead. And when under a legal hold, Google continues to delete chats in the 24 hour history mode, but will not delete chats in the 30 day history mode.
> That is, Google's theory here seems to be that if you have a policy to destroy certain letters and memos 24 hours after receiving or creating them, then you don't need to stop doing that and preserve them even if under a court ordered legal hold. But if your policy is to destroy certain documents 30 days after creating them, then you must stop deleting them and retain them if ordered by a court.
> Which is....a.....theory!
I suppose that's what email and design docs are for, but I feel a lot of that "organizational glue" in chat is quite valuable. How do Googlers live without it?
Google has an internal stackoverflow-style site as well as bug reports and mailing lists that are all preserved for longer than 1-1 chats.
Me: I’m trying to build //big/important/project, but I’m getting this error on my Mac: “GShoe 1.3 required, but not found.” I depend on it here in my BUILD file: cl/42069. Can someone help me?
A: We deprecated GShoe last year, what are you trying to do? This isn’t something we support. Say, who are you? Don’t you work in a completely different org? We do all our builds on Cloudtop anyways…
Me: I was just trying to get acquainted with the code, this GShoe integration is something that I was interested in playing with.
A: Wait, this isn’t even your job? Hang on, why does your CL add butts.txt?
Me: Uh, I’m doing a thing…for Memegen?
A: …
More seriously though, checking your chats is something I can do myself without imposing myself on you, and it includes basically everything you’ve ever talked about rather than just what you see fit to publish and stand behind. I don’t need to have to wait until I’m stuck enough to ask a question, make sure you understand what I want, nor do I have to argue with you whether what I’m doing is appropriate or not. Or, more likely, I’m not going to get anyone spending time to reply anyways, because your promo committee is not going to search you on MOMA to see how many people you made happy online. So I’d really rather just trawl your chats and send you back documentation or questions based on that rather than you taking a moral stance that deleting your chat history means my life is better or easier.
So yes, searching for your GShoe error, and (assuming you found nothing) asking about it on YAQS is not a bad way to get help from some random faraway team.
I suppose it's partially because most team chats are locked down (invite-only). In a company with a reasonably open slack, you might be able to ask in #gshoe-team or search it for relevant conversations, but not at Google in my experience - and this is setting aside the issue of message retention.
BTW, I agree 24h retention was truly ridiculous. Most of my colleagues hated it - fortunately (probably as a result of this legal case!) they disabled it and now the default is 30d everywhere.
Regarding promo, community contributions are still very much an expectation. Being active on YAQS counts toward that. True, the promo committee isn't going to go looking for it, so your manager needs to agree YAQS is a level-appropriate community contribution and include that in your promo packet.
Disclosure: I left Google like, a couple weeks ago
This is normal operating procedure everywhere: write stuff down. It was how everyone did things before chat was digital, and how they do now too.
If people are relying on searching chat history for how to fix things or get things working, then you are working at a cowboy outfit where quality must suck. I am not saying google the ideal here - I have no insider knowledge there - but fuck dude using chat history to document and maintain your system? Jesus.
It’s pretty great and one of the amazing things on having a lot as chat, it also allows you to easily reach out to anyone very quickly and feels more personal than a ticket in some archaic bug system that becomes a black hole after it gets introduced.
Be careful with your assumptions - it’s not like Google has created much of value in the past N years with its current culture, its original culture (book how Google works) seems much more like the cowboy you criticize
In the case of Google, the culture was, explicitly, about destroying potential evidence of wrongdoing [1].
[1]: https://ia601707.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...
That's a poor culture, then. The company's original ethos -- organizing existing, organic knowledge in ways that make it searchable, accessible, and useful -- was much better for everyone, both inside Google and outside.
Or at least it was better for everyone inside Google until they started breaking the law. Then it became a liability, which is why you were told that the culture was about "creating artifacts."
It happens a ton that an exchange is misunderstood and the wrong action is taken. I can't image having only some resume of the whole thing and no logs of who participated, who said what at what time, and replay it all to get back on track from where it went off the rails.
Sure you can just have the same discussion again, but that's such a waste of time IMHO.
Heck, sometimes I responded to questions with a CL adding that info to docs.
The internal search engine helps drive a lot of this, too - if you want to know how to do something, docs (via search) are like the #1 choice. So, everyone's pretty incentivized to make it a good resource.
Having chat history and being able to type "chat:"Bob Joe" mitigation jitter identity server" or whatever search query to dredge up the single useful command that slipped through the PKM cracks is so useful.
I guess one is forced to be disciplined about it, but I wonder if Google knows whether this chat-curtailment policy is basically costing them millions in wasted dev time because they have to re-ask for help and bother people. However, in my current company (using Teams), I still get re-asked for help all the time and usually quote reply my prior message saying "please search for this before asking. I found it easily".
If you do something to solve a problem, that should go into a ticket or into a note file or even into a paper notebook.
I'm older, maybe this is partly generational. I find chat to be almost uniformly annoying, and I use it very rarely. I sometimes go days without even launching my chat client. I prefer email which doesn't have the expectation of "drop what you're doing an pay attention to ME!!" that chat does.
It might be the bright side of a dystopia, but this is actually pretty useful in practice. If you can't reference previous chats, you don't have to spend time doing it. Instead, you rememeber you had a chat about how to do X, and then do X however you like, because there's nothing to say that's not how to do it. When someone asks you a question on chat, you don't have to be sure about the answer, unless they're going to use it right away, because they'll just do whatever they wanted after the chat expires anyway. This is freeing, in the same way that an autoclosing bug tracker is freeing.
> > Which is....a.....theory!
I guess their theory is these ephemeral chats are like phone calls, as opposed to written communication.
they were under legal obligation to retain that evidence, and were lying in court and claiming that they were retaining that evidence.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
>All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had "put a legal hold in place" that "suspends auto-deletion." Indeed, during the United States' investigation and the discovery phase of this litigation, Google repeatedly misrepresented its document preservation policies, which conveyed the false impression that the company was preserving all custodial chats. Not only did Google unequivocally assert during the investigation that its legal hold suspended auto-deletion, but Google continually failed to disclose—both to the United States and to the Court—its 24-hour auto-deletion policy. Instead, at every turn, Google reaffirmed that it was preserving and searching all potentially relevant written communications.
What Google did here is sanctionable. It's not something the courts tend to look favorably on and could ultimately end up getting a default judgement.
And this isn't the first case of Google burying evidence to try and complicate legal proceedings. They had, for example, the policy of "any email with sensitive stuff should cc legal" policy to try and shield potential criminal behavior with attorney client privilege.
We have evidence that Google execs instructed their relations to turn off chat specifically to avoid future discovery [1]. Excerpt from this document :
> In one Chat, Mr. Pichai began discussing a substantive topic, and then immediately wrote: “also can we change the setting of this group to history off.”1 Then, nine seconds later, Mr. Pichai apparently attempted (unsuccessfully) to delete this incriminating message.
[1]: https://ia601707.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...
This is a well established part of legal practices government or otherwise. If you sue someone or something civility you are entitled to read all documents they have on the matter in discovery.
This isn't the government being nosey, it's part of law to ensure justice is done. If you claim "we aren't doing x" your position is strengthened if all you docs say "we don't do X" it is only weakened if you docs say "we are definitely doing x".
It also cuts both ways. You get to get the documents from the litigant related to the topic at hand. If that have docs that say "we are only suing to shut them up" that can look really bad at trial.
Discovery is there so there isn't surprises at trial. Everyone gets to know what everyone has do they can plan out the best legal theories for themselves. It would actually be unfair otherwise.
Consider, for example, if the government sued Google for X, but they had documents in their possession that said "Google did not do X". That unfairly puts Google at a disadvantage and calls into question why the prosecution happened in the first place.
Like I get that you are echoing the (good) advice to never talk to police, but contemporaneous notes can save your bacon if you are acting in good faith. There's a reason former lawyers tend to meticulously note take at meetings.
Particularly if you aren't in a decision making position, taking notes is a CYA move, especially if you think the company is doing something potentially shady.
Why do you think every business issues receipts and invoices? It's not a tax thing, it's a legal thing. These little pieces of paper can cover the business's ass if you later claim they overcharged for a service not performed or good not delivered.
It's different because the law covers recorded information, and the law cares about provable intent. Worth pointing out that this law is old with a lot of modern intepretations be wary of treating this literal text as the only substance of it
The law doesn’t operate in some kind of “gotcha” or “this one trick” manner. Judges can see through this crap relatively easily.
The main questions are around who is obligated to retain the messages and for how long.
I get that I should talk to a lawyer. That's not the point. The point is, IMO, recording chat is over the line. email yes, documents yes, chat and video conferencing no. People would find a judge ordering all employees direct face to face conversations being recorded to be unacceptable. To me chat = slightly facilitated face to face conversions. To me it's a slippery slope. If chat is ok today, video conferencing tomorrow, then demand total surveillance next because it will be technically possible (already is). That fact that it's trivial to record chat ignores that it shouldn't be required to be recorded in the first place.
People here are okay with because is popular to hate on Google. You're next.
What makes you think "chat" is any different than email?
My (IANAL) understanding is that even if a Judge didn't order it explicitly, writing something like "let's not discuss this in email, meet me in the hallway" can look very bad in retrospect. Similarly, explicitly turning off chat transcripts (or failing to turn them on) when required may not be a good strategy, as this article shows.
From the article: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37 "If electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery, the court [...] (2) only upon finding that the party acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation may: (A) presume that the lost information was unfavorable to the party; (B) instruct the jury that it may or must presume the information was unfavorable to the party; or (C) dismiss the action or enter a default judgment."
Bottom line is that companies should assume that the government has a right to audit their practices at any time for any reason, and avoid intentionally destroying potentially valuable information.
No. When a company reasonably anticipates litigation, which is more than just knowing litigation is possible, that's when they need to avoid destroying information relating to the litigation.
Examples of situations that fit are: 1. when they know a suit has been filed 2. when the company is contemplating litigation - i.e. when they have asked for a legal opinion, started doing some groundwork, looked into feasibility of suit etc.
It certainly sounds like destruction. The words are written, then the words are encoded as text, stored, and sent, and then at the end, discarded.
Once a company knows its going to be sued it has a legal obligation under federal rules to preserve evidence. Google deliberately ignored that requirement.
Nice try.
When they do a chat, that creates evidence. When the chat is deleted, evidence is destroyed. (This isn't the first case they’ve been sanctioned over this behavior, either.)
This isn't a loophole. Google is in the wrong here.
Once evidence exists, not retaining it involves deleting it. So you’ve simply rephrased what they are accused of and framed it as if that is a denial.
Which, you know, is kind of all there is to spin with when there are no favorable facts, but why spin for Google?
A group of executives meets. Should that meeting be recorded, even if it’s not a “hybrid” meeting and entirely happened in person?
A group of engineers meets. How about that one?
This seems like a hard issue. If the court creates a precedent here, I expect any sensitive discussions that might have any sort of future liability will just go back to verbal conversations (if allowed), and then aren’t we back to where we are today, with no record?
That depends. Did the court order that to happen? (Like in this situation!)
If so, then yes, the company should follow the lawful order of the court.
And if such an order is unlawful, then they should appeal it, and do what the appeal court orders them to do.
If they are discussing matters related to the company, then it should at least be minuted.
The counterpart to "don't take notes on a criminal conspiracy" is "why, if you're not involved in a criminal conspiracy, are you not taking notes?"
(This has become absolutely endemic in UK government where all kinds of things happen in encrypted whatsapp groups .. which are then selectively leaked by one of the attendees.)
I get that you're eager to create a slippery slope, but you're just showing your ass.
This isn't a regulated industries issue: all parties to actual or reasonably anticipated litigation are required to preserve evidence.
Not as a “reasonably anticipated” but just always.
I think companies that manage lots of private user data should probably be held to the same standards.
> Punishing Google for being the best would be “unprecedented,” lawyer argued.
How does deleting evidence make you “the best”?
Also, obstruction of justice charges aren’t exactly unprecedented. We need obstruction of justice to be harsher than the crime itself to discourage blatant hiding of evidence
In the article this comes from a completely different argument in a completely different point against a MS argument that Google has violated the Sherman act in the same way MS did.
The quote is from Google attorney who pointed out that all the companies that had signed exclusive deals with Google had testified that they chose Google because it was the best.
It doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with the chat history argument.
Google is full of really clever people who know how clever they are. The government should just give up now and Google should just win by default.
The reverse is not true.
There's power in information, but physical power trumps that.
"Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google's revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements. These agreements, the DOJ and state attorneys general argued, work to maintain Google's monopoly over search."
>Punishing Google for being the best would be “unprecedented,” lawyer argued.
the article doesn't seem to cover this subhead, but I'm guessing this is a reference not to failing to keep records of their anti-competitive practices, but to something along the lines of "google only seems like a monopoly because they're such a good competitor they wind up with all the customers"
The same policy but in the form of "discuss these things over the phone" would not just be unremarkable, it's the norm.
The failure to extend the same treatment to unlogged text chats is discriminatory to people with disabilities and different personalities. ... and it's at odd with the underlying principle that when you know you're subject to litigation you're required to retain records you created but you're not obligated to create new records.
And even if it had been to have no obligation to _create_ records even then.
Google's policy is isomorphic to "don't discuss these legally sensitive matters except via the phone" and the DOJ wants sanctions because no one took and retained notes from the calls.
Except keeping those conversations on the telephone and not taking notes is unambiguously legal and a common practice... In google's case "phone" is replaced with unlogged chat.
The differential treatment is discriminatory. The ephemeral chat serves an identical purpose to a phone call, but is compatible with people with different communications needs.
One need not assume bad faith for wanting to have discussions off the record: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." casual comments, jokes, confusion, or exploration taken out of context can be easily misconstrued. Just the cost of having to review more potentially relevant material in discovery can be devastating.
People also cannot come to understand their legal obligations unless they're free to discuss them without fear that any little misstatement or bad phrasing will turn around and burn them-- and these discussions don't happen exclusively with lawyers in the room as behaving legally and ethically is everyone's responsibility (in spite of what lawyers in their effort for full employment sometimes want you to believe!).
Nowadays I can use an autotranscription service, but obviously its privacy level is very different.
If you’re ordered to retain communications, sure. And in a civil court, it’s fair to conclude adversely if a party’s messages disappear suspiciously. But by the government? No.
They weren't always using Signal. They had many thousands of emails and other communications that were preserved and used as evidence.
I use FaceTime Audio frequently for calls. Once I was asked to testify in respect of an investment fraud I prompted my firm to report. I got grilled for not being able to provide complete call logs. My concern is criminalising incomplete records creates the precedent of requiring them at all times.
If you know how to access these records from a year ago, I’M genuinely curious for the answer, because I couldn’t for the life of me figure that out.
For what it’s worth anecdotally, I have info in my call log going back to 2022. If you have local backups via iTunes and/or Files app, you may also be able to find call logs. Apps such as iMazing Phone Evidence and other tools from that company are able to explore local backups and physically connected devices.
Recents only goes back a few days. I don’t see Phone or FaceTime as options in my iCloud back-up, and there is no folder in Files corresponding to them. (Are you referring to iCloud Drive? I don’t have it enabled.)
Granted, there is a good chance I disabled something somewhere, because I’m not a fan of a tech company having more information than it needs on me.
> I don’t see Phone or FaceTime as options in my iCloud back-up
It’s under Settings, then the top navigation [your Apple ID name] section above Airplane Mode which is the Apple ID settings -> iCloud -> Apps using iCloud -> Show All.
This Apple Support page may be helpful to you and others.
> Locate backups of your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
> Find a list of your iOS or iPadOS backups on your Mac, PC, and iOS or iPadOS device. Learn how to delete backups, copy them, and more.
I don't think the executives need to do anything themselves at a company like Google -- whether it is their (managed) phone or laptop, likely the IT would install and set up these things and everything would be ready to use. If not they have assistants who can do the chores.
That seems wrong.
Yes, how else could it work? For example if you have a policy to destroy CCTV footage at the end of the day then it’s not illegal to do that. If you have a policy to keep CCTV footage but when the police come and ask you some questions you delete it because you know that it contains evidence of a crime, that’s destruction of evidence. It’s not illegal to delete things, otherwise the world would run out of storage, it’s illegal to delete things to knowingly impede an investigation.
I'm never talking to anyone over insecure channels again.
You can and should do this. No one will punish you for it in court unless you refuse to give them evidence that they have legally obtained.
I'm not sure why this is so complicated for you.
Let's say you murder someone with a knife, and you keep that bloody knife in a safe labeled, "Potential Evidence of Murder". A judge orders you to open the safe, and instead you incinerate it and everything inside it.
You wouldn't be punished for keeping your jewels in other safes. You'd be punished for committing a crime and then preventing a court from getting the evidence.
- publicly traded
- more powerful than many entire countries
- committing crimes
...when those executives explicitly switched to disappearing messaging in order to cover up those crimes?
Context matters. I don't want to live in a world where people can avoid prosecution just by deleting evidence.
Agree. But they shouldn’t be denied any protections we plebeians would expect and be afforded.
It seems to me that we can, have, and should punish people for success if that success is likely to lead to well known kinds of market failure, and that such a policy is generally non-controversial outside of the most extreme forms of libertarian political philosophies (which unfortunately, are disproportionately prevalent in big tech and likely to get the whole industry in serious hot water).
Certainly, you could make the same "natural monopoly" argument against just about every serious anti-trust action that has taken place in the past. It didn't work then and I don't think its going to work now.
Pretending that closed platforms that exist on computer networks (and are not themselves networks) somehow makes this all different is not very convincing. Network effects, as we've come to understand the term, are not new, and have existed before computer networks. To the extent they exist, it's evidence of need for intervention because of a clear failure of a market to self regulate (what some may call a "natural" or just a regular monopoly) and maintain a competitive market, not evidence that everything is okay.
I also seriously take issue with the idea that Google provides an "essential service". Power, food, water, and you could make an argument for computer and communications infrastructure, are "essential". Google search is not. If it disappeared, society would soldier on and we would all be fine. At worst it would be a minor inconvenience for users and a headache for IT departments and developers.
I also offered an alternative solution to private interests capturing natural monopolies: the state subsidizing a public option that can do that. My preference would be state funding for the development of open source software and decentralized platforms that can substitute for proprietary software and centrally managed platforms.
In fact, the state is ideally situated to fund this kind of public goods development, as it is the only legal entity with a broad enough tax collective apparatus to capture the gains from such investments.
As for essential/non-essential, perhaps you're right in terms of terminology. In any case, internet search is a widely used and extremely valuable service that enhances quality of life.
>such a policy is generally non-controversial outside of the most extreme forms of libertarian political philosophies (which unfortunately, are disproportionately prevalent in big tech and likely to get the whole industry in serious hot water).
Something being non-controversial doesn't make it right. It was uncontroversial anti-libertarian ideology that found a way to justify imprisoning hundreds of thousands of elderly people for a year during the COVID pandemic:
No airplanes here but the same shady evil practice.
This is why they probably removed the "don't be evil" from their code of conduct.
Not for nothing, but as a paramedic, the number of patients who've sworn black and blue that they're "no longer suicidal", "no longer a threat", "if anything happens to me, it definitely wasn't suicide" who ... went on to attempt or commit suicide in very short order is non-trivial.
> The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined 11 Wall Street banks and brokerages more than $1.8 billion in a long-anticipated move to curb finance employees’ use of unapproved messaging platforms and companies’ failures to keep accurate records of those communications, the regulators said Tuesday.
But it's not a "cool" tech company so you don't hear about it on HN.
This is civil court.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/03/28/judge-sanctions-google-for...
They are a "publicy traded" company (like Tesla) because their shares are available on the stock market for non-qualified investors, and not "privately held" (like SpaceX).
Why would you be allowed to have unrecorded conversations in the office? Doesn’t that show the same intent?
Is the default to record all chat conversations? Yes.
Then Google enacted a policy to have employees turn off the recording of chat conversations if they were going to discuss certain topics.
If you delete chat, that is destroying written records.
Are all written records supposed to be preserved when you're in litigation, or just relevant records?
Disclosure issues, and destruction of records, are prominent issues in two UK scandals just now: the Contaminated Blookd Scandal, and the Post Office Horizon scandal.
That's one of the arguments Google tried. Good luck.
Flipping this around, do you think Google's legal team, which is probably equally qualified and vastly more well paid (and with a lot more to lose if they're wrong), would advise employees to do this if they hadn't considered such trivialities?
Well, I would expect Google's legal time to advise employees not to do anything illegal, yet here we are.
Depends on what their risk-reward appetite is. Competent people will make surprising decisions under pressure.
That's the same for DoJ. In fact, for them it's all wins and no loses. In the worst case their argument just doesn't stick.
There is already a lot of precedent around policies related to spoliation which is why it would be a surprise to me if Google's legal team actually did advise employees to do this as a blanket policy. It seems more likely that they said they could do it for things that are not potentially relevant to litigation and the execs took it as far as they wanted to go.
And by the way, Telegram chats can auto-delete messages.
> the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law."
This is too arbitrary. It is like saying that everyone who uses secret chats and auto-deleted photos in Telegram is a criminal trying to hide the evidence.
Google has two modes of conversation history retention. The first, the default, is "delete after 24h". The second, which is opt-in only, and apparently extremely rarely used, is "delete after 30d".
Google attempted to be too tricky for the court. They decided that when place on legal hold, they'd continue to retain the opt-in messages only, and continue to delete the 24h retention messages, which is not what they were told to do.
And then, because they thought they could get away with it, on dozens of occasions they told the DOJ and the courts that they were holding and retaining all message history...
(except the 99% they were still deleting).
If so, then they better record everything their employees say!
Hard to see a reason not to apply that to discoverable communications of public companies too.
Maybe we don't want to live in a (self-imposed) surveillance state?
(Google didn't destroy chat logs, they just had history off for them)
My understanding is it is as simple as the following: Google was ordered to retain information, and afterward specifically changed their policies such that the information would not be retained, and also misled the court that the information was being properly retained.
This is a weird argument I'm seeing a lot. Isn't this just a variable trigger for deletion? What is the functional difference in the code, I mean?
Using a really, really simple example: If this were stored in a table, I could make a front end button say delete and call that back to the back-end to push the command to delete the cell/row/whatever; I could also set a timer on that with an if/then statement using date of creation and current date and remove the front-end functionality, or have some front-end trigger to turn on the loop to count down the whatever time period, 30 days say.
The end result is the same; the command being sent is [delete], not [don't save this]. I guess without the command the default would be that the data was wiped when the power to the machine went out like with a TI-99, is that what you are thinking of?
for message in messages:
if message.t < 86400
keep(message)
else
continue
// let nature do its thingWhere does keep(message) send things? Is that not stored anywhere?
Sorry if this is too complicated, I don't know a lot about chat technically so trying to wrap my head around this.
If you get sued and have to turn every email and chat message over for discovery, that's a lot of information to review to make sure you don't miss anything or share too much. Much easier if you delete everything after 90 days
https://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsug_html_chunked/ChTelRTP.ht...
I guess we’re entering an era of come at us, fed bros. Iron Mountain is… empty.
Being publicly traded only means that a centralized regulatory gatekeeper lifted the prohibition on people trading its securitized equity. This is a right that all companies should have by default, and not a state of affairs that should impose special restrictions on the company.
(also, taking the position that it's just a cloud of individuals is worse for them in this case, since that would enable every employee who disabled chat saving to be jailed for contempt of court)
Before limited liability laws into effect, limited liability "already emerged through free contracting". [1]
The common law version comes without the problematic 'limited liability for tort' element that limited liability statutes introduce.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240301154801/https://admin.fee...
Somebody many years ago mentioned on HN that a startup wanted to start a bank. After several years of dealing with the bureaucracy for approval they gave up.