Judge mulls sanctions over Google's destruction of internal chats

Critical information which commenters here are missing:<p>&gt; The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure *required* Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation.<p>&gt; Google did not.<p>&gt; 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.

&quot;Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google&#x27;s revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements.&quot;<p>They didn&#x27;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.

The subtitle is really weird:<p>&gt; Punishing Google for being the best would be “unprecedented,” lawyer argued.<p>How does deleting evidence make you “the best”?<p>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

The allegation in the article is not that google destroyed internal chats, but rather had instructed staff to turn off the chat saving feature before having such chats. Just as inculpatory, but not the same thing:<p><i>&quot;Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google&#x27;s revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements. These agreements, the DOJ and state attorneys general argued, work to maintain Google&#x27;s monopoly over search.&quot;</i><p>&gt;<i>Punishing Google for being the best would be “unprecedented,” lawyer argued.</i><p>the article doesn&#x27;t seem to cover this subhead, but I&#x27;m guessing this is a reference not to failing to keep records of their anti-competitive practices, but to something along the lines of &quot;google only seems like a monopoly because they&#x27;re such a good competitor they wind up with all the customers&quot;

Being able to privately discuss matters is apparently a freedom only afforded to personalities that are comfortable speaking voice in real-time.<p>The same policy but in the form of &quot;discuss these things over the phone&quot; would not just be unremarkable, it&#x27;s the norm.<p>The failure to extend the same treatment to unlogged text chats is discriminatory to people with disabilities and different personalities. ... and it&#x27;s at odd with the underlying principle that when you know you&#x27;re subject to litigation you&#x27;re required to retain records you created but you&#x27;re not obligated to create new records.

Sorry, did I commit fraud by discussing business over dinner without a stenographer present?<p>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.

Note that Google was sanctioned last year for similar conducted in the anti-trust litigation over the Play Store as they are now facing sanctions over in the anti-trust litigation over adtech.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfstandard.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;28&#x2F;judge-sanctions-google-for-deleting-internal-chat-logs-central-to-antitrust-cases&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfstandard.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;28&#x2F;judge-sanctions-google-for...</a>

ELI5: why is there any expectation for corporations to keep chat logs or emails long term? Is there some legal requirement I don&#x27;t understand?

Send Pichai to jail for a week and watch the CEOs of the biggest companies fall over themselves to comply with court instructions.

To those arguing about the semantics of deletion vs. never having saved it in the first place, do you believe the DOJ would make this claim without having considered such trivialities?

What Google does makes sense. If I were running a company I would also prefer to auto-delete internal communications not to leave any traces. It is stupid to collect data that will be used against you. It actually surprises me that there are companies who preserve evidence against them even when not required by law.<p>And by the way, Telegram chats can auto-delete messages.

Could you make the same argument about in person chats out loud?<p>If so, then they better record everything their employees say!

Certainly in the UK there are personal implications for both employees and company directors when breaking certain laws — I have in mind the Bribery Act 2010, which takes an absolutely scorched earth approach to bribery.<p>Hard to see a reason not to apply that to discoverable communications of public companies too.

Is there a technical name for the two tiered legal system we have here? The average jack off is never going to get away with destroying evidence, yet the rich, and corporations are given deference all the time for all sorts of shit.

Most of the companies I have run across have some type of ephemeral chat history policy to limit potential legal peril. I always found that to be shady.

It’s amazing to me that it cannot be interpreted as obstruction of justice to say “don’t record illegal conversations”

Learn to use the phone when you want an undiscoverable chat, like everyone else on the planet.

RICO to use Software as a legal shield

my corp encourages using slack and said they’re going to purge stuff a couple years old.<p>I guess we’re entering an era of come at us, fed bros. Iron Mountain is… empty.

The state ought to have no legal right to compel people to keep records of their private communications.

The way to fairly attempt ending a monopoly is not by quelling the power of the monopoly but by removing hurdles for new businesses to start. Then again a monopoly is not always bad if they provide the best product&#x2F;service.<p>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.