Discovery Steering Committee re Google Antitrust Litigation [pdf]
ia804605.us.archive.org
ia804605.us.archive.org
After hearing from Google's counsel, the court stated, It's no excuse and Maybe it wasn't malicious, maybe it wasn't in bad faith, but it clearly was not being done under proper supervision, either internally or externally. And you've put everyone in an unfortunate situation by your failure to do that. (Id. at 56, 58.) The Court appeared further concerned about the delay in jumping on this issue sooner: You've known about this for a month now. You knew about it starting on August 18th. You knew there was a real issue. There didn't seem to be a call to arms then. The first time I heard about it was September 1, and it was this, you know, like, whoops, we've got a problem. It wasn't as clear as I now know how egregious this is. (Id. at 59.)"
They seem to have significant problems. Its broader then "not discovering" 5 minus 1 million of documents. There seems to be multiple smoking guns in evidence: https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416652.pdf Google internal Email instruct: never to talk about 'market share' or even 'markets'. This is clear and deliberate behaviour to evade government regulators. It is institutionalised through legal training class 101.
Disclaimer: not a lawyer, CS professor with some courtroom experience.
That seems like a no-brainer thing a company should be doing.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/23/doj-says-google-destroyed-ch...
Putting aside whatever predisposition you have about Google and this case, I do find it troubling that American jurisprudence is headed for a future where there is no such thing as going off the record, if you are using a chat app. Nobody thinks you have to record and preserve face-to-face communications, but apparently people want it to be that you always have to record and preserve them if there was some intermediate device used to do it, other than by voice. In the WFH era this bothers me.
Hard agree. I have personal bias in this case, but it’s crazy to me that sentiment on off the record chat in these threads has been so heavily weighted towards normalizing the idea that everything should be recorded. I would be horrified if certain of my Slack DMs end up in discovery at my current job. I have to admit that sometimes I just need to blow off some steam to my teammate who sits two states over, and we communicate on Slack or Zoom, both of which are automatically recorded and preserved for at least a short time. Bob in procurement is not a literal gnome-fucking-shit-smear-artist but sometimes I do feel that way. My barber doesn’t know Bob but my teammate sat in the same meeting where we got a raw deal so we bond over the experience by saying stupid things in a Slack DM conversation. Under the developing regime this kind of casual talk on company systems is a risk for both myself and my employer if it ends up getting keyword matched during discovery. Not sure where a reasonable line is but it does seem like the grey area needs urgent attention before tech turns into finance.
That's irrelevant, IMHO.
If an exchange is recorded, then it's fair game for legal discovery.
I'll give you some (modified[0]) 25+ year-old advice that's just as relevant today to messaging/collaboration apps as it was to email: If you wouldn't want to see it on the front page of the NYT/WaPo/FoxNews/HN/Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/tiktok/BBC/Deutsche Welle/YouTube/etc., then don't put it in any recorded form.
And that goes triple for anything shared on platforms you don't own and physically control -- especially those owned/controlled by your employer.
You might just as well just wear a GoPro 24/7 and livestream the feed everywhere.
I'd add that in a professional setting, anything that might even be tangentially related might well be subject to discovery in the event of a lawsuit.
Don't like it? Get the laws changed. And good luck with that. You're gonna need it.
[0] The original advice referenced "local newspapers" and email, but since the former are mostly gone and (at least you claim it's so) "email is flat or shrinking", I thought I'd update it for you.
Edit: Fixed typo.
Indeed, and 25 years ago the balance of communication was significantly less recorded, was the point of the story.
You're absolutely correct.
And for those of us who care about our privacy, more's the pity. :(
Or consider the following quote from That Hideous Strength, written and set in the mid 1940s; the "Bill" in question has recently been murdered:
---
"There's a letter you wrote," said the Fairy.
"What letter?"
"A letter to Mr. Pelham, of your own College, dated six weeks ago, in which you say, 'I wish Bill the Blizzard could be moved to a better world.'"
Like a sharp physical pain the memory of that scribbled note came to Mark. It was the sort of silly jocularity one used in the Progressive Element -- the kind of thing that might be said dozens of times a day in Bracton about an opponent or even about a bore.
---
If that scene was written now, the message in question would certainly have been a text. Email is certainly much more convenient than snail-mail or inter-departmental memos, but people have been writing short, quick notes to each other for millennia.
NB a few minor edits.
I'm forced to point out that, maybe, working at a company smuggling erotic gnome depictions should be avoided in your specific case.
Exactly how bored are you?
Are you thinking C corporations like couple-owned small businesses and startups?
Accurate Zoom transcripts can be automatically created for every call but this feature is off by default. When it defaults on, does the same rule apply?
In terms of the rules and regulations, is there a digital means to have a private conversation?
Am I permitted to FaceTime?
Under what circumstances can myself and a co-worker communicate on personal devices?
What is your personal opinion on return to office vs hybrid vs all-remote or remote first?
[0] It's not really a secret, but rather a concept you might want to consider if you value your privacy.
Would you really be okay with the government knowing everything you say during business hours? Should they also force companies to have microphones in conference rooms when you speak in person? In the bathroom?
And recording meetings isn't the stretch you might think. Financial companies have long had a variety of legal obligations to record communications related to financial trades and customer orders. This isn't just for funsies. Trust in the financial system is an incredibly valuable societal asset, and good records both mitigate errors and reduce crime.
As we see with the rise in recorded video meetings and auto-transcription services, plus the utility of from things like Slack's search, companies are seeing the value of keeping track of what happened. But that's not new; I don't know how far back the custom of meeting minutes goes, but it was in Robert's Rules of Order in 1876. [1] So it's entirely plausible to me that in a generation's time, auto-transcripts of every meeting will be seen as normal, with auto-summarization and LLM querying thrown in for free.
[1] https://www.fulltextarchive.com/book/Robert-s-Rules-of-Order...
Google is just an adTech company masquerading as a search engine? Who cares?
Second: this is only a problem where you have significant pressure/attempts to specifically avoid leaving paper trail in order to do something dicey. If you're fairly sure you shouldn't be doing it, and the only thing keeping you from talking about it is being on the record, then blurt that shit out on the record, because odds are you shouldn't be doing it.
I'm okay with that, so long as any potential employer understand I also put a premium on it.
Companies could set up internal chat solutions where conversations aren't logged.
But they'd like to spy on everyone's message traffic for their own purposes, at that point their logs are subject to subpoena.
No, transient storage of chat records has specifically been categorized as unacceptable in exactly these ongoing Google litigations.
No, they absolutely can. You may be confusing this with various first amendment cases about compelled speech, given the focus on a court ordering code authorship. A regulator does not have to concern themselves with the mechanism of storage, they can simply designate communications as requiring storage. And they have done so in the case of electronic transmissions. The relevant law allows regulators to compel retention of written communications. Storing a communication in memory and sending it over the network to the memory of another computer for display is by itself sufficient to qualify as a written communication.
Consider what would happen if a company deployed a system of microphones across their offices such that all in-person conversations were logged. They'd then look at these logs, discipline people based on "private" exchanges etc.
Then when they got into some legal trouble they'd say "oh, we'll keep the microphones and surveillance practices, but expire the records after X days".
That's fundamentally different from the situation of simply removing the surveillance. A court could very reasonably conclude that the company is structuring its affairs in such a way as to avoid court oversight.
I've worked at other companies with similar expiry policies. It's well known in the industry that everyone does this to avoid discovery.
For the employees it's the worst of both worlds: You don't get privacy, and you also can't look up some valuable exchange that happened 90+ days ago.
I think the courts are right to call companies on this particular line of bullshit, and very much doubt that the government could force companies without the proverbial microphones everywhere to install them.
> “[W]ould it be too much to ask you to turn history off?,” another employee wrote in a chat about Mobile App Distribution Agreements, or MADAs, contracts that Google requires device manufacturers to enter into to license Google Mobile Services. “lots of sensitivity with legal these days :).”
> Initially, Google had also claimed that it did not have the “ability to change default settings for individual custodians with respect to the chat history setting,” but evidence “plainly established that this representation was not truthful,”
> Google lawyers also argued that Chat was used primarily for nonbusiness, casual conversations, but the court found that the company does in fact use it to discuss “substantive business.”
How can you read this and not believe that these people knowingly participate in illegal business.
They will have the conversation off the record, and if text isn't available it will be a call or meeting instead.
So, Google is bad at finding things.
Objective failed, I guess?
The idea that Google always wanted to be evil but was stymied by that pesky motto and then decided "I know, I'll change the motto (but keep it in the code of conduct) and then I'll be free to be evil" is just disconnected from reality.
> So you’re talking about potentially five times what you’ve produced, and you’re saying you thought there was substantial completion done? It’s false. It wasn’t; was it?” (Id. at 55.)
Well, what can you do? :shrug: Dogs eat homework papers, evidence slips and falls into shredders accidentally, unfortunate fires happen /s
But really, what could the court really do in cases like this, a slap on the wrist fine and everyone goes home and promises to behave better next time.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37
(added link, thanks)
But in that "big list of possible sanctions" is there anything that would inconvenience google as much as a $200 fine inconveninences someone on minimum wage? Is there anything at all that isn't just a trivial business expense dwarfed by what they will pay their lawyers just for this one case? Is there any risk of a human being held accountable for anything?
The worst case scenario is Google just looses the case and the FTC gets whatever it has asked for.
The likelihood of that happening is up for debate of course, but that is the very very very bad thing that could happen.
And goes straight to appeal. What can the FTC even ask for? Jail terms for execs the way it happens to poor people who can't pay fines? Somehow I doubt the "very, very, very bad thing" could meet a materiality test in goog's P&L or balance sheet.
>> is there anything that would inconvenience google as much as a $200 fine inconveniences someone on minimum wage?
So do we have a /hard/ no on that yet?
As a deterrent to failure to produce inculpating documents, "maybe" getting the same punishment as producing the documents faithfully falls rather short.
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
(Submitted title was "Google's 5M Document Discovery Failure: "Egregious", Says Magistrate Judge [pdf]")
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Litig%2e
[fixed typo and HN does not accept trailing dot in URL]
Note: I'm about as pro-break-them-up as they come and truly think ruling against Google/Amazon/FB will be great for both the tech space as well as society as a whole