alt Hacker NewsHow Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment
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These policies are in place because companies have learned that journalists will happily take any comment, from any employee, from any context, and make it Crucial Evidence(TM) of impropriety...
> put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded
Wow. One of the very first things I learned when onboarding to a US company is that the client-attorney privilege does not work like that at all.
“Privileged and confidential” is not a legal shibboleth (especially not when used so incorrectly).
Two comments, directed to the majority of discussions:
a) It is ironic and indefensible how a company known for storing and gathering the world's information, engages directly in a massive evidence spoliation strategy in direct violation of the Duty to Preserve as outlined in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37) That is deletes information.
“Google had a top-down corporate policy of ‘Don’t save anything that could possibly make us look bad,’” she said. “And that makes Google look bad. If they’ve got nothing to hide, people think, why are they acting like they do?”
b) I think and I hope we have not heard the end of this. There are worse things to do than being found as an individual to have violated anti-trust laws, I don't know say have actively setup and organized thousands of people to directly obstruct justice and destroy records to hide such actions: 18 USC §§1503, 1512(c)... (See https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512)
"Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the Epic case, said that there was “an ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence within Google” and that the company’s behavior was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” He added that after the trial, he was “going to get to the bottom” of who was responsible at Google for allowing this behavior."
You have the DoJ and three judges looking at you with your pants down. I hope this is the beginning honestly, otherwise what message does it send to every other entity out there? Imagine this happening on any interaction you have as a consumer or employee.
The story is simple:
Google communication culture started as open and relaxed so people could go on a public internal forum and say their opinion "I think if we add x, y, z feature we can kill the competition". This is nothing specific to Google, it happens perhaps everywhere but Google wasn't policing it in written communication.
Then all these written opinions were gobbled up by lawyers during the discovery phase of endless lawsuits Google has to defend. It created constant headache so they said, we'll auto delete chats older than a few days unless you opt-out.
Now a court and this article say they are destroying evidence.
I've personally lost my trust in both the media and the legal system honestly. The incentives are just not aligned with good outcomes. The incentive for the media is more and more drama and the incentives for lawyers is always adversarial depending on who they represent.
I remember Urs arguing for this at TGIF quite some time ago. He said legal costs were increasing exponentially while the value of old email was only linear, which was unsustainable.
One outcome of this was to wipe a number of ongoing scientific discussions I was having with external collaborators. I'm used to people having the last 30 years of mail on hand to be able to carry out extremely long, complex projects.
Governments have similar problems too: activists/journalists can make sunshine requests of day-to-day communication on a daily basis to find any written mistakes to turn into PR nightmares. This incentivizes politicians to delete their texts regularly to avoid the hassle https://missionlocal.org/2024/10/s-f-mayor-city-attorney-bro.... Willie Brown also famously told people that the e in email stands for evidence.
Works where archive.ph is blocked:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241120125505/https://www.nytim...
It’s possible with digital tech, always on mics, and remote work that absolutely every communication within a company could be recorded forever.
Would humanity be better off? Or are people stupider when they are thinking out loud in front of recording devices?
How much do the lawyers deserve to know?
I think this happens at pretty much every company but Google is particularly effective at it and/or just got called on it.
I'd bet that most tech execs have been trained to take the juicy stuff off of official comms altogether and use some privacy preserving mediums like signal or telegram - probably colluding with 'competitors' there as well.
This is a BS story.
Pretty much every public company, at least every bigtech company, follows the same conventions -- don't say incriminating things in chat, trainings for "communicate with care" (definitely don't say "we will kill the competition!!" in email or chat), automatic retention policy etc etc.
No need to single out Google.
Is this different from retention policy at any other business with competent lawyers?
Google, a company who's goal is, ostensibly, to make the world's information accessible, has been working hard to conceal information about itself. The irony is palpable.
This is totally true of a number of large companies including most of big tech. Bad retention of communications, overuse of attorney privilege, using euphemisms or code words, etc are all standard. They hide their truly damaging intentions but it’s an open secret within these companies. Different regulations are needed to fix it.
Google 100% provided advice for concealment specifically targeted at future litigation. Gchat logs were specifically reduced company-wide explicitly to avoid court discovery.
I personally saw the advice to cc a lawyer with a legal question in order to bring a conversation under attorney client privilege.
The penalty they’re facing in now way accounts for the money they saved by concealing evidence, which basically means “keep doing it, it works!”
That's what happens when your society weaponized laws.
I can only imagine that institutional knowledge will slip through the cracks thanks to sleazy retention policies made to thwart lawsuits. Tech debt will accumulate until it implodes.
We trust lawyers and software, and lawyers not so much. Lol. I see a humanless future for Google, perfect security.
Seems like there’s an opportunity to build an AI B2B SaaS that flags companies’ sketchy comms to be scrubbed.
No surprises here frankly; for a public company, sticking to “don’t be evil” conflicts with fiduciary duty, and only the latter is law.
If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded.
There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication. Defining that, while allowing the collection of evidence of criminal activity, won't be easy, but the current state of affairs is unworkable.
I don't wish to facilitate corporate crime, and it's obvious that some of Google's anti-competitive behavior is unlawful. But, I don't see any realistic alternative to what Google is doing in the current legal environment.