alt Hacker NewsLike 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.)
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They explicitly weren't punished as Google lost the anti-trust lawsuit.
I'm not too sure it's the best decision to let all the individuals that intentionally either deleted or in Sundar's case attempted to delete evidence (legal hold overrides right click -> delete) completely off the hook.
> Because this form of evidence destruction is viewed as legal by the courts if you're not a "highly regulated" business like a bank, [..…]
Which is exactly the crux of the problem.
Why do we have two completely opposite regimes for arguably not very different types of organizations?
Intentionally short data retention policies should be illegal – but obviously that's completely infeasible in the US with its incredibly expensive legal discovery process, so that would be the first thing to fix.
On the flip side, even regulated industries should get to have a digital equivalent of an unmonitored "conversation on the golf course/in the elevator" etc. – or do we seriously want to incentivize that in a world where we're rethinking physical offices?