"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
~Eric Schmidt
lol
~Eric Schmidt
lol
(In context, they were talking about the long-retention and implicit-digital-footprint effects on online services, and he was noting that the trends were only going to become "more observation" and "more retention" over time... At some point, it becomes much cheaper to just not do the thing online if you want to preserve your privacy
... and in general, he was right. It's not just government observation; it's corporate observation and private observation, and the ability to churn through someone's entire Twitter history, etc., etc.).
Eric Schmidt is not some misunderstood truth-sayer. He's a crook and a hypocrite and the things he says are received poorly because he's an elitist who's made his $25,000,000,000 fortune punching down.
In addition, I fondly remember him quibbing that there is no internet in jail. :/
Saying that, I'll leave you in the knowledge that Google Meet is excellent for off the record conversations (and executives are great for ignoring rules set for the rest of the company).
And somehow Mr. Schmidt considers himself to be a well behaved[1] person.
"I am very well tested, I am very well behaved."
-Eric Schmidt
[1] https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt
Eric stepped down as Google's CEO in 2011 and it could be argued that the execution since then has been meh.
At google's scale, it's virtually impossible to NOT have mountains of "incriminating" conversations.
Also, it seems arbitrary that OTR chat should be recorded but hallway conversations and phonecalls are ok to delete...
If you regularly create records of conversations and phone calls, evidence preservation rules apply to those records as well; you cannot delete them, either.
The fact that no records are usually made in the first place and that the only evidence of the content of such conversations is witness testimony not records means that evidence preservations laws don’t apply (but if you tamper with the witnesses, that is a fairly serious offense.)
Do you believe lawyers and judges are unfamiliar with this issue?
Like their entire lives are spent reviewing documents, letters and email. They invented the concept of Disclosure before computers existed, so that Defence can rebut or put proper context to any argument that will be made by prosecution.
Then, the entire point for some lawsuits existing is to set the stage for that information to come out for no good legal reason.
You can think of it as legal hacking.
I regret writing that last sentence.
They are absolutely familiar with this issue and if you've ever been in any legal case, they'll gleefully exploit every small word to make you look like the biggest criminal rapist in the world and maximize the time you spent in jail.
Go read why exactly do we support Signal and other E2E encrypted messengers. Establishing precedent that every word you say while WFH can be used against you for decades is problematic no matter how much you hate Google.