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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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...
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.
> 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.
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.
(... 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).
> 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”
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..."
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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"?
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
It's always funny when Eric Schmidt says stuff like that.
I've shared it before but I'll inline this evergreen quote from a book called In The Plex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27479152
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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[1]https://www.zachvorhies.com/blacklists/
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.
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Sounds like corporate welfare to me.
Even the Devil himself believes he’s doing the right thing because “doing right” is completely subjective.
Anything is possible when values are pliable.
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
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".
It's a bit of a stretch for the government to assume this feature exists solely to piss off the government.
He suggested that criminals make enough opsec mistakes that would be recorded that the government need not be worried.
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.
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?
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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
This is Google we're talking about here.
If only they have technology that would help them doing such searches...
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> 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.”
zoinks
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.
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.
(... 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).
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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.
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> “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.
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."
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
Would it be reasonable for Google to have anticipated this litigation in 2019 after those events.
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.
They are dogfooding, which is why trying to adopt their products has been a case study in getting screwed.
- GCal spam anyone, who hasn't been coming to unwanted meetings?
- How about 4-5 redundant messaging services?
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),
2 Sara Forden & David McLaughlin, DOJ Scrutinizes Google Advertising, Search in Antitrust Probe, Bloomberg Law (Aug. 8, 2019), Source: https://ia601604.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.vaed.5...Google didn't do it, it was those other individuals who defied the court order. Uh huh.
> 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.
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.
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For precisely the reason you indicated.
'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.
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.
You have a contact you remember who emailed you three years about a thing... you'll never find them again.
I was genuinely shocked to discover how often I needed an email from over two years ago to check on something or someone. Oh well.
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.
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.”
> 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!
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's a precedent workplace surveillance in total scale just to hunt for (I quote) "shady shit".
1) Use Postini
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.
5) Continue breaking the law.
6) GOTO 2 when the next subpoena arrives.
~Eric Schmidt
lol
(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.).
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.
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).
And somehow Mr. Schmidt considers himself to be a well behaved[1] person.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper...[1] https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt
Eric stepped down as Google's CEO in 2011 and it could be argued that the execution since then has been meh.
At google's scale, it's virtually impossible to NOT have mountains of "incriminating" conversations.
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.)
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.
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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.
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.