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Comment by revelio | Hacker News Reader

This headline is very misleading. He's not being accused of deleting them. He is being accused of not creating the chat records in the first place. Legally these are different things. There's no obligation to generate as much evidence as possible just in case one day you get sued by someone who might want it. Lit holds are just that, holds, you have to hold records you already have and not destroy them. The assumption in the system is that institutions generate records as a natural matter of course, and that's what the plaintiffs are being allowed to get access to. This complaint seems very likely to fail as a result, short of some sudden change in the standard understanding of record retention laws.

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> He’s not being accused of deleting them. He is being accused of not creating the chat records in the first place.

Online chats exist as digital data ab initio, the issue is not creation (which had to happen for there to be a chat) but retention. The fact that the UI of a system may present things suggesting that “creating” a record is a separate act does not make it so.

It's perfectly possible to build a chat system that never creates any logs or recordings. Their chat system doesn't make recordings and then immediately delete them if you're chatting "off the record".

Now, plaintiffs lawyers will presumably try an argument like yours but if they succeed it's not obvious why it wouldn't immediately require all meetings of all employees to be videoed and recorded in perpetuity (as a company like Google always has hundreds of in flight lawsuits), nor is it obvious why that wouldn't extend to meetings where all the participants are in the same room and thus don't need a video call at all - perpetual 24/7 surveillance.

The law isn't consistent with how it treats communication, so it's sort of obvious why a change to how one sort of communication is treated wouldn't necessarily impact a different sort of communication.

Is it put into RAM? That really is the creation of a record.

Not if it wasn't moved to somewhere more permanent. Otherwise speaking is also creating a record since you could have saved those air wave readings.

You’re quibbling over the use of “creation” while ignoring the fact that “CEO deletes chats” is a very misleading headline.

The document says he set his own relevant chats to delete after 24 hours. I think we are quibbling over what "delete" means. When he set them to auto delete after 24 hours he was essentially deleting them. It's like saying I've never deleted anything- I move files to my recycle bin and then my computer does what it does.

Slightly different. Google Chat logs aren't direct p2p, they are most definitely logged records. Otherwise the messages wouldn't still be there when you log out and back in. However, they are tagged to be ephemeral and self-destruct after 24h.

So how would the law here work? If I delete my chat logs it's illegal. But if I create a feature that helps me delete my chat logs, it's not?

Honestly I have no idea.

> Google Chat logs aren't direct p2p, they are most definitely logged records. Otherwise the messages wouldn't still be there when you log out and back in.

That's not how p2p works. Signal messages are not p2p but the server doesn't need to store them because the clients store what they've received. Same for pop3 email clients which talk to the email server (not p2p to the sender). Quite a few systems work this way that are not peer to peer. Not sure if you meant p2p literally or if it was a shorthand for systems that don't work like Telegram that store everything on the server forever (in which case I guess it must seem like I am just being pedantic, which I'm not trying to be).

No you're right, I was slightly worried about the usage of p2p and was expecting someone to correct me. Apologies for using the wrong word.

I was referring to the fact that self-destruct messages in Google Chat can be seen within 24h regardless of which device you log in with, this means it has to have been stored server side.

Signal has multi-device self-destruct also, even to a few seconds, but that doesn't mean that you can't see it anymore on your laptop if the phone in your pocket fetched it and your laptop was rebooting. The message is (as I understand it) addressed to both devices, probably Signal doesn't even need to know whether the recipients are one account or whether it's a group chat, or that the message has a self-destruct timer set on it. The server just stores messages until the client for which it was intended has fetched them (with some maximum, I guess). Google's chat could work the same, but I'm not sure we can know that. The server software is probably not open source.

Phone calls also aren't direct p2p and can be trivially recorded, so that's irrelevant. Google Chat does not retain messages when history is off, according to their own documentation:

https://support.google.com/vault/answer/7657597?hl=en#zippy=...

"Not covered: history off"

If it turns out their documentation is wrong and off-the-record chats aren't actually off the record then yes, you will be correct. But where is the evidence that it's the case? Google Apps is used by hundreds of thousands of companies and it has a sophisticated infrastructure for implementing retention limits and legal holds. Why are people here assuming that all that work has been done by incompetents?

I don't understand why you're comparing to phone calls here when the post you're replying to starts with "Google Chat logs aren't direct p2p, they are most definitely logged records. Otherwise the messages wouldn't still be there when you log out and back in." which is simply not true for voice calls, which are synchronous. Chats are asynchronous and store history in the client so you can scroll back (even if history is eventually purged client side on a timer or when you exit), and if chat history is enabled on the server, they store it there too.

A better point of comparison would be voicemails, but I don't think we're talking about those.

If the law tells you "if you delete any of your text communications relative to this case I will slap you" and you either:

* Make text communications and manually delete them after

* Make text communications through a channel that you yourself set to delete after

* Try to take the piss out of the law and say on your text communication "let's talk about this subject that I definitely have to record all my texts for in person so I don't have to send texts"

should you really be surprised when the law slaps the shit out of you ? If there's one thing it hates, it's being taken for a fool.

> The newly produced Chats reveal a company-wide culture of concealment coming from the very top, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who is a custodian in this case. In one Chat, Mr. Pichai began discussing a substantive topic, and then immediately wrote: “[redacted]” Then, nine seconds later, Mr. Pichai [redacted]. When asked under oath [redacted]"

Sounds like he deleted them to me.

You don't understand what you are talking about, yet you keep making more comments.

Chats in their messenger program are written records that need to be retained. Even in their magic "off the record mode", Google retained those messages for 24h.

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