How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

Google 100% provided advice for concealment specifically targeted at future litigation. Gchat logs were specifically reduced company-wide explicitly to avoid court discovery.

I personally saw the advice to cc a lawyer with a legal question in order to bring a conversation under attorney client privilege.

The penalty they’re facing in now way accounts for the money they saved by concealing evidence, which basically means “keep doing it, it works!”

It's illegal to destroy evidence of a crime but it's not illegal to avoid creating evidence in the first place especially if you genuinely believe that you're not doing anything wrong. Generally speaking, companies are not obligated to preserve every chat forever just in case they get sued later on.

>Gchat logs were specifically reduced company-wide explicitly to avoid court discovery

While heavily pushing Gchat to corporate customers.

At least you can't accuse them of getting high on their own supply.

> The penalty they’re facing in now way accounts for the money they saved by concealing evidence, which basically means “keep doing it, it works!”

This is a free long term loan. It's almost like corporations pay for the laws to be like this.

Everything that happened around this time was so fishy. I completely lost trust on Google doing the right thing at this point as they were silencing people protesting against working with military/defense contractors.

I wonder if the widespread adoption of video chat will shake up norms here. Not recording or purging the recording from a Zoom meeting or Zoom-enabled conference room seems exactly as scandalous as using an OTR messenger or a short retention period on email.

> It's illegal to destroy evidence of a crime but it's not illegal to avoid creating evidence in the first place...

One can see how regular folks might consider the practice of automatically destroying chat and email messages after one to three months destruction of material which could be evidence.

"Never erase anything" seems to work fine for highly-regulated businesses like banks. And while long-term storage of electronic communications isn't free of charge, it's not at all in the same ballpark as storing decades of paper memos and other paper internal office communications.

Also: The widespread directive to "magically" turn documents into privileged communication with lawyers makes Google's bad intent very, very clear.

On one hand, I think corporations need to be accountable to government and the people.

On the other hand, humans do not like being watched and documented constantly - I think it is a burden to society's mental well-being.

I would not want to be constantly recorded in my team staff meetings, in office or in zoom.

>I personally saw the advice to cc a lawyer with a legal question in order to bring a conversation under attorney client privilege.

Does that work legally though? If it's not only sent to the lawyer then you can't really claim that it's privileged information.

And I would not want my work chats or emails made public!

> One can see how regular folks might consider the practice of automatically destroying chat and email messages after one to three months destruction of material which could be evidence.

I doubt it, expiring chats are widespread even among consumers.