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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

This quote basically disproves the phrase Sundar repeatedly parroted to Congressional members about making it easy for people to configure their privacy settings. You can bet this quote is going to be read to his face if there's another hearing.

The author of the statement was redacted in the public version, but my bet is if that is still a current employee, they won't be for much longer. Because this quote is going to hang over Google for the rest of this process.

And as many Google people are probably being reminded this week: Assume all of your work emails may some day be public, and used against you or your employer in a court of law.

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> Assume all of your work emails may some day be public, and used against you or your employer in a court of law.

True, but not necessarily bad.

There's always a gotcha document when there is an investigation -- it's the nature of the beast. There's always a tension between attorneys who want to keep everything and attorneys that would put a paper shredder in the output tray of every printer.

Without context, a quote is a quote. I saw one scenario where someone using a cliche "pets vs. cattle" analogy in context of servers was manipulated to sound like some sort of crazy person in a complaint. If it's response to a request to obfuscate or manipulate options for a specific purpose, that's one thing. If it a person asked to provide feedback from the perspective of a user, it's another.

> Assume all of your work emails may some day be public, and used against you or your employer in a court of law.

Why wouldn’t you? One of the biggest benefits of written communication is being able to avoid a he said she said scenario.

> if there's another hearing.

Oh, no, another hearing. I am sure he is very afraid of another strongly worded letter after that one.

We constantly see executives and officials lie at those hearings, yet they face no repercussions whatsoever.

>And as many Google people are probably being reminded this week: Assume all of your work emails may some day be public, and used against you or your employer in a court of law.

They don't need to be reminded because Google has been coaching staff to basically adopt some sort of Google newspeak:

"One part of the presentation, subtitled “Communicating Safely,” advises employees on which terms are “Bad” and “Good.” Instead of “market,” employees may say “industry,” “space,” “area,” or simply cite the region, according to the presentation. Instead of “network effects,” the presentation suggests “valuable to users.”

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...

That's regular legal speak.

if you're required to engage in legal speak in normal workplace conversations what's the difference exactly. The only other place I know of where you need to talk in code between two coworkers to not draw the attention of authorities is the mafia

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