alt Hacker Newsgoogle made internal chat messages disappeared after N days, which was disclosed in one of the trials, but I do not recollect any following punishment.
google made internal chat messages disappeared after N days, which was disclosed in one of the trials, but I do not recollect any following punishment.
Like many US big companies, Google activated the court-sanctioned evidence destruction machine. (AKA "Document Retention Policies")
Because this form of evidence destruction is viewed as legal by the courts if you're not a "highly regulated" business like a bank, unless you've been specially and specifically ordered by the courts to preserve evidence there is no punishment for destroying evidence in this way.
A few years back, Google execs did choose to continue to destroy evidence after a court ordered them to preserve evidence and turn off their evidence destruction machines. I do not remember whether or how severely they were punished. (If they were, surely the punishment was far less than it would have been for we mere peons.)