It's illegal to destroy evidence of a crime but it's not illegal to avoid creating evidence in the first place especially if you genuinely believe that you're not doing anything wrong. Generally speaking, companies are not obligated to preserve every chat forever just in case they get sued later on.

>I personally saw the advice to cc a lawyer with a legal question in order to bring a conversation under attorney client privilege.

Does that work legally though? If it's not only sent to the lawyer then you can't really claim that it's privileged information.

> 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!”

This is a free long term loan. It's almost like corporations pay for the laws to be like this.

Everything that happened around this time was so fishy. I completely lost trust on Google doing the right thing at this point as they were silencing people protesting against working with military/defense contractors.

>Gchat logs were specifically reduced company-wide explicitly to avoid court discovery

While heavily pushing Gchat to corporate customers.

At least you can't accuse them of getting high on their own supply.