They didn't ask employees to destroy evidence but to avoid retaining evidence in the first place. Not leaving sensitive information in logs, backups etc is quite reasonable, even if it would have been useful to justice here.
> Chats at google by default have 24 hours of chat history. (That is, after 24 hours, the chat history is delelted.) You can opt in to having 30 days of chat history instead. And when under a legal hold, Google continues to delete chats in the 24 hour history mode, but will not delete chats in the 30 day history mode.
> That is, Google's theory here seems to be that if you have a policy to destroy certain letters and memos 24 hours after receiving or creating them, then you don't need to stop doing that and preserve them even if under a court ordered legal hold. But if your policy is to destroy certain documents 30 days after creating them, then you must stop deleting them and retain them if ordered by a court.
> Which is....a.....theory!
I suppose that's what email and design docs are for, but I feel a lot of that "organizational glue" in chat is quite valuable. How do Googlers live without it?
Google has an internal stackoverflow-style site as well as bug reports and mailing lists that are all preserved for longer than 1-1 chats.
Me: I’m trying to build //big/important/project, but I’m getting this error on my Mac: “GShoe 1.3 required, but not found.” I depend on it here in my BUILD file: cl/42069. Can someone help me?
A: We deprecated GShoe last year, what are you trying to do? This isn’t something we support. Say, who are you? Don’t you work in a completely different org? We do all our builds on Cloudtop anyways…
Me: I was just trying to get acquainted with the code, this GShoe integration is something that I was interested in playing with.
A: Wait, this isn’t even your job? Hang on, why does your CL add butts.txt?
Me: Uh, I’m doing a thing…for Memegen?
A: …
More seriously though, checking your chats is something I can do myself without imposing myself on you, and it includes basically everything you’ve ever talked about rather than just what you see fit to publish and stand behind. I don’t need to have to wait until I’m stuck enough to ask a question, make sure you understand what I want, nor do I have to argue with you whether what I’m doing is appropriate or not. Or, more likely, I’m not going to get anyone spending time to reply anyways, because your promo committee is not going to search you on MOMA to see how many people you made happy online. So I’d really rather just trawl your chats and send you back documentation or questions based on that rather than you taking a moral stance that deleting your chat history means my life is better or easier.
So yes, searching for your GShoe error, and (assuming you found nothing) asking about it on YAQS is not a bad way to get help from some random faraway team.
I suppose it's partially because most team chats are locked down (invite-only). In a company with a reasonably open slack, you might be able to ask in #gshoe-team or search it for relevant conversations, but not at Google in my experience - and this is setting aside the issue of message retention.
BTW, I agree 24h retention was truly ridiculous. Most of my colleagues hated it - fortunately (probably as a result of this legal case!) they disabled it and now the default is 30d everywhere.
Regarding promo, community contributions are still very much an expectation. Being active on YAQS counts toward that. True, the promo committee isn't going to go looking for it, so your manager needs to agree YAQS is a level-appropriate community contribution and include that in your promo packet.
Disclosure: I left Google like, a couple weeks ago
This is normal operating procedure everywhere: write stuff down. It was how everyone did things before chat was digital, and how they do now too.
If people are relying on searching chat history for how to fix things or get things working, then you are working at a cowboy outfit where quality must suck. I am not saying google the ideal here - I have no insider knowledge there - but fuck dude using chat history to document and maintain your system? Jesus.
It’s pretty great and one of the amazing things on having a lot as chat, it also allows you to easily reach out to anyone very quickly and feels more personal than a ticket in some archaic bug system that becomes a black hole after it gets introduced.
Be careful with your assumptions - it’s not like Google has created much of value in the past N years with its current culture, its original culture (book how Google works) seems much more like the cowboy you criticize
In the case of Google, the culture was, explicitly, about destroying potential evidence of wrongdoing [1].
[1]: https://ia601707.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...
That's a poor culture, then. The company's original ethos -- organizing existing, organic knowledge in ways that make it searchable, accessible, and useful -- was much better for everyone, both inside Google and outside.
Or at least it was better for everyone inside Google until they started breaking the law. Then it became a liability, which is why you were told that the culture was about "creating artifacts."
It happens a ton that an exchange is misunderstood and the wrong action is taken. I can't image having only some resume of the whole thing and no logs of who participated, who said what at what time, and replay it all to get back on track from where it went off the rails.
Sure you can just have the same discussion again, but that's such a waste of time IMHO.
Heck, sometimes I responded to questions with a CL adding that info to docs.
The internal search engine helps drive a lot of this, too - if you want to know how to do something, docs (via search) are like the #1 choice. So, everyone's pretty incentivized to make it a good resource.
Having chat history and being able to type "chat:"Bob Joe" mitigation jitter identity server" or whatever search query to dredge up the single useful command that slipped through the PKM cracks is so useful.
I guess one is forced to be disciplined about it, but I wonder if Google knows whether this chat-curtailment policy is basically costing them millions in wasted dev time because they have to re-ask for help and bother people. However, in my current company (using Teams), I still get re-asked for help all the time and usually quote reply my prior message saying "please search for this before asking. I found it easily".
If you do something to solve a problem, that should go into a ticket or into a note file or even into a paper notebook.
I'm older, maybe this is partly generational. I find chat to be almost uniformly annoying, and I use it very rarely. I sometimes go days without even launching my chat client. I prefer email which doesn't have the expectation of "drop what you're doing an pay attention to ME!!" that chat does.
It might be the bright side of a dystopia, but this is actually pretty useful in practice. If you can't reference previous chats, you don't have to spend time doing it. Instead, you rememeber you had a chat about how to do X, and then do X however you like, because there's nothing to say that's not how to do it. When someone asks you a question on chat, you don't have to be sure about the answer, unless they're going to use it right away, because they'll just do whatever they wanted after the chat expires anyway. This is freeing, in the same way that an autoclosing bug tracker is freeing.
> > Which is....a.....theory!
I guess their theory is these ephemeral chats are like phone calls, as opposed to written communication.
they were under legal obligation to retain that evidence, and were lying in court and claiming that they were retaining that evidence.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223...
>All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had "put a legal hold in place" that "suspends auto-deletion." Indeed, during the United States' investigation and the discovery phase of this litigation, Google repeatedly misrepresented its document preservation policies, which conveyed the false impression that the company was preserving all custodial chats. Not only did Google unequivocally assert during the investigation that its legal hold suspended auto-deletion, but Google continually failed to disclose—both to the United States and to the Court—its 24-hour auto-deletion policy. Instead, at every turn, Google reaffirmed that it was preserving and searching all potentially relevant written communications.
What Google did here is sanctionable. It's not something the courts tend to look favorably on and could ultimately end up getting a default judgement.
And this isn't the first case of Google burying evidence to try and complicate legal proceedings. They had, for example, the policy of "any email with sensitive stuff should cc legal" policy to try and shield potential criminal behavior with attorney client privilege.
We have evidence that Google execs instructed their relations to turn off chat specifically to avoid future discovery [1]. Excerpt from this document :
> In one Chat, Mr. Pichai began discussing a substantive topic, and then immediately wrote: “also can we change the setting of this group to history off.”1 Then, nine seconds later, Mr. Pichai apparently attempted (unsuccessfully) to delete this incriminating message.
[1]: https://ia601707.us.archive.org/28/items/gov.uscourts.cand.3...
This is a well established part of legal practices government or otherwise. If you sue someone or something civility you are entitled to read all documents they have on the matter in discovery.
This isn't the government being nosey, it's part of law to ensure justice is done. If you claim "we aren't doing x" your position is strengthened if all you docs say "we don't do X" it is only weakened if you docs say "we are definitely doing x".
It also cuts both ways. You get to get the documents from the litigant related to the topic at hand. If that have docs that say "we are only suing to shut them up" that can look really bad at trial.
Discovery is there so there isn't surprises at trial. Everyone gets to know what everyone has do they can plan out the best legal theories for themselves. It would actually be unfair otherwise.
Consider, for example, if the government sued Google for X, but they had documents in their possession that said "Google did not do X". That unfairly puts Google at a disadvantage and calls into question why the prosecution happened in the first place.
Like I get that you are echoing the (good) advice to never talk to police, but contemporaneous notes can save your bacon if you are acting in good faith. There's a reason former lawyers tend to meticulously note take at meetings.
Particularly if you aren't in a decision making position, taking notes is a CYA move, especially if you think the company is doing something potentially shady.
Why do you think every business issues receipts and invoices? It's not a tax thing, it's a legal thing. These little pieces of paper can cover the business's ass if you later claim they overcharged for a service not performed or good not delivered.
It's different because the law covers recorded information, and the law cares about provable intent. Worth pointing out that this law is old with a lot of modern intepretations be wary of treating this literal text as the only substance of it
The law doesn’t operate in some kind of “gotcha” or “this one trick” manner. Judges can see through this crap relatively easily.
The main questions are around who is obligated to retain the messages and for how long.
I get that I should talk to a lawyer. That's not the point. The point is, IMO, recording chat is over the line. email yes, documents yes, chat and video conferencing no. People would find a judge ordering all employees direct face to face conversations being recorded to be unacceptable. To me chat = slightly facilitated face to face conversions. To me it's a slippery slope. If chat is ok today, video conferencing tomorrow, then demand total surveillance next because it will be technically possible (already is). That fact that it's trivial to record chat ignores that it shouldn't be required to be recorded in the first place.
People here are okay with because is popular to hate on Google. You're next.
What makes you think "chat" is any different than email?
My (IANAL) understanding is that even if a Judge didn't order it explicitly, writing something like "let's not discuss this in email, meet me in the hallway" can look very bad in retrospect. Similarly, explicitly turning off chat transcripts (or failing to turn them on) when required may not be a good strategy, as this article shows.
From the article: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37 "If electronically stored information that should have been preserved in the anticipation or conduct of litigation is lost because a party failed to take reasonable steps to preserve it, and it cannot be restored or replaced through additional discovery, the court [...] (2) only upon finding that the party acted with the intent to deprive another party of the information’s use in the litigation may: (A) presume that the lost information was unfavorable to the party; (B) instruct the jury that it may or must presume the information was unfavorable to the party; or (C) dismiss the action or enter a default judgment."
Bottom line is that companies should assume that the government has a right to audit their practices at any time for any reason, and avoid intentionally destroying potentially valuable information.
No. When a company reasonably anticipates litigation, which is more than just knowing litigation is possible, that's when they need to avoid destroying information relating to the litigation.
Examples of situations that fit are: 1. when they know a suit has been filed 2. when the company is contemplating litigation - i.e. when they have asked for a legal opinion, started doing some groundwork, looked into feasibility of suit etc.
It certainly sounds like destruction. The words are written, then the words are encoded as text, stored, and sent, and then at the end, discarded.
Once a company knows its going to be sued it has a legal obligation under federal rules to preserve evidence. Google deliberately ignored that requirement.
Nice try.
When they do a chat, that creates evidence. When the chat is deleted, evidence is destroyed. (This isn't the first case they’ve been sanctioned over this behavior, either.)
This isn't a loophole. Google is in the wrong here.
Once evidence exists, not retaining it involves deleting it. So you’ve simply rephrased what they are accused of and framed it as if that is a denial.
Which, you know, is kind of all there is to spin with when there are no favorable facts, but why spin for Google?
A group of executives meets. Should that meeting be recorded, even if it’s not a “hybrid” meeting and entirely happened in person?
A group of engineers meets. How about that one?
This seems like a hard issue. If the court creates a precedent here, I expect any sensitive discussions that might have any sort of future liability will just go back to verbal conversations (if allowed), and then aren’t we back to where we are today, with no record?
That depends. Did the court order that to happen? (Like in this situation!)
If so, then yes, the company should follow the lawful order of the court.
And if such an order is unlawful, then they should appeal it, and do what the appeal court orders them to do.
If they are discussing matters related to the company, then it should at least be minuted.
The counterpart to "don't take notes on a criminal conspiracy" is "why, if you're not involved in a criminal conspiracy, are you not taking notes?"
(This has become absolutely endemic in UK government where all kinds of things happen in encrypted whatsapp groups .. which are then selectively leaked by one of the attendees.)
I get that you're eager to create a slippery slope, but you're just showing your ass.
This isn't a regulated industries issue: all parties to actual or reasonably anticipated litigation are required to preserve evidence.
Not as a “reasonably anticipated” but just always.
I think companies that manage lots of private user data should probably be held to the same standards.