How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded.

There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication. Defining that, while allowing the collection of evidence of criminal activity, won't be easy, but the current state of affairs is unworkable.

I don't wish to facilitate corporate crime, and it's obvious that some of Google's anti-competitive behavior is unlawful. But, I don't see any realistic alternative to what Google is doing in the current legal environment.

Is something like Signal disappearing messages illegal?

I remember when Mark Cuban tried to make his CyberDust app.

google made internal chat messages disappeared after N days, which was disclosed in one of the trials, but I do not recollect any following punishment.

> If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded.

> There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication.

Wow. This is the opposite of how I feel. Mega-corporations should have their communications logged at a much higher level than a normal business. The things that have come out in court show how they manipulated their customers (advertisers). Regardless of how you feel about advertising a portion of those companies are small mom and pop shops trying to get by. If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.

“ If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.”

I’m surprised to see someone advocating for “if you haven’t done anything wrong you don’t have anything to hide” on HN. The cognitive dissonance must be in overdrive here!

It ends up as evidence when routine business operations are breaking the law. Everywhere I’ve worked hasn’t had an issue with this stuff being tracked and several places actively preferred when stuff was recorded. Most companies don’t have an issue with clear communication because they’re not worried about what’s being said will end up part of a criminal investigation.

So this is something that’s almost exclusively going to harm criminal organizations by making them less efficient.

That sounds like a win win.

Like many US big companies, Google activated the court-sanctioned evidence destruction machine. (AKA "Document Retention Policies")

Because this form of evidence destruction is viewed as legal by the courts if you're not a "highly regulated" business like a bank, unless you've been specially and specifically ordered by the courts to preserve evidence there is no punishment for destroying evidence in this way.

A few years back, Google execs did choose to continue to destroy evidence after a court ordered them to preserve evidence and turn off their evidence destruction machines. I do not remember whether or how severely they were punished. (If they were, surely the punishment was far less than it would have been for we mere peons.)

> Mega-corporations should have their communications logged at a much higher level than a normal business.

I agree. But, it needs to be balanced by making the penalties for companies engaging in vexatious and/or abusive litigation and vexatious discovery tactics very, very harsh. Megacorps would dislike both of those things happening to them, so we'll never see it.

It's not that, though, I understand the temptation to `sed` what they said into that. It's easier, more fun, and its much more work to come with curiosity.

No, please stop with this false equivalence. People get rights and benefit of the doubt. Corporations do not.

> The cognitive dissonance must be in overdrive here!

That's overly glib. Large and megacos should be held to a higher standard than ordinary folks and small mom-and-pop shops.

A decent rule could be "If you have an army of lawyers (whether on retainer or on staff), you're presumed to have a far higher-than-normal understanding of the law relevant to your business and get far less lenience and forbearance from the courts.".

Yes, I know that's not how it works today. I'm saying that it SHOULD work that, maybe after a six or twelve month advance notice period.

financial and corporate transparency and privacy are a very different matter to the transparency and privacy of an individual.

despite the whackadoodle precedent that corporations are people, corporations are not people. they may be made of people, but the affairs of those people are within the course of their employment, acting on behalf of the corporation.

It does happen, ex. the financial industry is famously subject to the logging, and you'll see most startups take their first big leap into the enterprise by adding complete logging specifically for many who implement that.

I worked at Google between 2016 and 2023 and I feel embarrassed by this. I knew it was wrong, but just said "oh this must be what being at bigco is like." We were an exception.

Corporations are not people. What a single person does while not affecting anyone else is nobody’s business, but what companies do affects a lot of people, hence it is other peoples’ business.

> Mega-corporations should have their communications logged at a much higher level than a normal business.

I agree entirely. And it's not like it's unprecedented: we treat banks like this already. They have to keep records of all internal communications for years.

And it doesn't stop banks from breaking the law, or their employees from doing so in (recorded and logged) internal communications.

> If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.

That does not match my second hand accounts of how the law and lawyers work at this level, at least in the USA. Lawyers, at least in part because it is there job, will scrutinize every communication for anything that has the slight chance to be interrupted in their cases favor regardless if that interpretation is truthful.

The system of law in the USA is adversarial, the Lawyer's job is to present the case in the best possible light not to find and present the truth. So if something taken out of context plays well for their case it will be used. That could include decades old communications that no one remembers happening on a tangental topic.

It's not false equivalence, we were talking about communications between people. Corporations don't write emails, people do. A corporation, big or small, is just a legal way of definining the property of people, and the people who work for it (who may or may not also own some of it) are people. Communications between them are communications between people.

What they're saying is that people deserve privacy, unless what they're doing has some relationship to making money, in which case they do not.

As Cardinal Richelieu famously said, “if you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

Much more than that, the legal system is just engaging in empire building here: Everything that is potentially relevant is subject to discovery, which increases billable hours…

And I assume approximately nobody in the legal sector has any interest in reducing these.

The collateral damage of the incentive structure created by this dynamic must be vast. Deleting everything by default as a (reasonable, at a micro-level!) leads to immense institutional knowledge loss.

There is actually no precedent that corporations are people. That isn't what corporate personhood means.

I wish that were true, but in the US at least[1], it isn't cut and dried.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood#In_the_Un...

> There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication

Funny really that it was Eric Schmidt who said on the topic of privacy: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

"... except if you're a corporate employee in a routine business conversation" – added Schmidt after some additional consideration.

> If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.

The problem is that most employees are not lawyers so they cannot make a proper legal judgement on their routine works. And even lawyers are frequently making mistakes. And if you think prosecutors are not good at "creative legal interpretation", then you probably don't know much about them. Seemingly innocent things can become the greatest weapon at the hand of competent prosecutor.

Corporations aren't real things. It's a group of people doing something. And people make mistakes.

One of the objectives of a corporation is to reduce liability. If open and honest communication means that they end up liable, then they just won't have open and honest communication. End result is dysfunctional and compartmentalized companies. And ultimately the cost for all of this will be borne by everyone.

One way to get open and honest communications from the corporation is if employees are personally liable. But then you wouldn't have open and honest communication from those employees.

There is a difference between keeping one's privacy and actively abusing and masquerading attorney client privilege to conceal criminal actions, knowing they are criminal actions. Because that is what Google was doing. They knew extremely well how they were violating the law and the implications.

And even worse, actively recruiting individuals to commit obstruction of justice and evidence spoliation (two distinct categories), so you as a company can thrive from crime a few more years.

The law is there to protect consumers.

Privacy law is there to protect everyone. Google could have easily said: I have the evidence, but I plead the fifth and not going to provide that evidence that you seek in discovery. The issue of course is in civil proceedings this means, the Court can instruct adverse inference or strike the pleadings -- that is a default judgment.

> The collateral damage of the incentive structure created by this dynamic must be vast. Deleting everything by default as a (reasonable, at a micro-level!) leads to immense institutional knowledge loss.

Agree wholeheartedly, would be great if would could step off this path, but I have not heard of any efforts in that direction or groups that champion it.

But you won't be able to _only_ use 6 lines from honest men. Their lawyer will produce the other ~300 lines of context.

There's nothing here to be curious about, just the usual "corporations bad". It's easy to mistake an emotion for an idea but it isn't.

I'd normally pass it by entirely with an eye roll, I just thought it was funny that it's the opposite of how they'd feel if talking about people in their personal lives, completely unaware that these are the same people at just a different time of day.

And the result is that the financial industry is basically untouchable. Everything is buried in so much red tape that it's impossible to compete. And the consequence is something we feel across society. Eg Visa and Mastercard picking and choosing which credit card transactions they allow has an impact on what is and isn't acceptable in our culture.

And nothing can be done about it.

But.. but.. ethics will degrade if you can't do illegal things!

Call me jaded, but if my 8 person company could say " maybe we should get legal advice before doing that" I am not going to wring my hands over poor, persecuted Google. They've become an ad company with some web tools on top.

having worked at a tech company subject to a “legal hold” just in case the government wanted to sue us in the future, i agree that it’s absolutely asinine. have to save every device, every file, every email, every chat, every document, forever, indefinitely? what does it even mean to “preserve a document”? can it be edited?

that understanding has obviously been that the people who wield the law are highly adversarial, so it is in their best interest to conceal as much as possible

The flaw that is limiting your thinking and understanding is companies don’t do things, only people can do things. Until you start seeing companies as a group of people, you can’t understand and predict how a “company” will act and behave. When a sales person is selling a product, it is a person who is acting, they may follow some policies, but another person made those policies. You need to expand your thinking into the individual people.

> If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer. The effectiveness of organizations, including the ability to act ethically, will be seriously degraded.

Most orgs I've been at with this concern either on a large or silo'd level, will either change policies to fit, whether that be retention times for chat messages or guidelines to not record certain types of meetings/etc.

> There needs to be some kind of work product doctrine, which protects the privacy of routine business communication. Defining that, while allowing the collection of evidence of criminal activity, won't be easy, but the current state of affairs is unworkable.

Mixed bag. Not every org will be OK with someone bringing up various regulations known in a recorded meeting, or even saying the potential number of impacted risk cases on a call raised with an issue in production. OTOH I've been at shops where I asked about the legality of something and it was thanked for being on the record (Thankfully that org was super-compliant and it was never about production, only design.)

This is simplistic thinking. Companies can’t do anything. People do things, sometimes as a functioning part of an organization. Companies don’t decide to cut down trees for profit, people decide to take that action. When you say “a company is damaging the environment” you’re allowing a person to hide anonymously under the veil of a legal entity. Companies can’t do anything. Only people do things.

If anything it speaks to the volumes of times that folks are pressured into doing something that is probably illegal but they won't get whistleblower protection on.

Yes, I think corporations are fundamentally different entities from normal businesses because they benefit from macroeconomic monetary policies and regulations in ways that normal businesses do not. As they have an unfair advantage over their competitors, they have a responsibility and should be treated essentially as government organizations. The correlation between corporate stock price and Fed monetary policy decisions is undeniable. Just consider that Fed money is the people's money... Paid for via inflation/dilution and loss of value of everyone's salary contracts. Literally, your 100k per year employment contract will have lost about half of its value after 10 years (assuming the government's own figures) if you don't re-negotiate your contract.

Plus, even if you do re-negotiate your contracts frequently, your salary still lags inflation and by that time your colleagues in the industry will be more oppressed than they are today and you will have to compete with people who will have lower self-confidence than they have today and thus they would accept lower salaries which will drive down your own wage.

The tech industry is tough because the average worker has low self-esteem. Also corporations drive down self-esteem by monopolizing the industry so even the most skilled workers feel hopeless to compete against them.

I wish I had put more thought into this when I started my career. I would have studied law. Lawyers have ridiculously high self-esteem considering often rather limited knowledge compared to engineering professions. Engineers are nerds with confidence issues so they tend to accept less than they could get, driving down wages. Not to mention regulatory moats that exist around the legal profession which keep the supply of accredited professionals low and thus keeps their wages high (supply/demand dynamics).

They explicitly weren't punished as Google lost the anti-trust lawsuit.

I'm not too sure it's the best decision to let all the individuals that intentionally either deleted or in Sundar's case attempted to delete evidence (legal hold overrides right click -> delete) completely off the hook.

I mean yes and no...

But it's a vague nebula. Stuff like whistleblower protections, retention laws, 'piercing the corporate veil'....

> People get rights and benefit of the doubt. Corporations do not.

Corporations are just groups of people. Unless you're accusing a company of being ran by AGI.

Imagine you work as an aerospace engineer. Imagine having to couch/overthink everything your say in communication so that it can't be taken out of context later. You literally have yearly training on how you have to communicate and in hugely impacts how people work because one dumb one off comment in email can financially end the company when an accident occurs.

and that's before you get to the fact that you have to defer how your IT systems work to the lawyers from the big overseas insurance company that covers your company/products. It's a major pain to get them to sign off on collaboration systems because they are such a discovery risk not because you are hidings, but because of how people communicate especially around issues. As far as discovery goes with aerospace, if your engineers anywhere acknowledged any problems, you are hit. How can you have a good product/continuous improvement when you can't acknowledge issues in writing?

Say we do this for car engineers. How do you communicate for continuous improvement when to acknowledge ANY issues will be used to sue the crap out of the company when accidents occur/issues come up? You are killing any sort of continuous improvement program if you do this. All that sort of communication will be switched to verbal are the requirement of Lloyds of London or whatever huge insurance company insures the business/products.

I'd be surprised if you could find a single aerospace engineer with more than five years of experience who hadn't learned to couch everything they say in a way that made it difficult to misinterpret or change by taking out of context.

I hugely agree on "corporations...[are] a group of people". I think it's an interesting model. But I would say that there's some essential liability that should be addressed or else the corporation has no reason to remain intact. Corporations that are trying to go below that standard will probably tend towards dysfunctional and/or corrupt behavior. Communication shapes organization, and if you tell me there isn't open and honest communication, I'm wondering what bad things they are doing or will do.

Conflating personal privacy with corporate secrecy is arguing in bad faith.

> One of the objectives of a corporation is to reduce liability.

Are the employees personally liable though?

> They have to keep records of all internal communications for years.

Except for those that happen in person, which is bizarrely arbitrary, especially in times of hybrid work. I do feel like there really should be a digital/remote equivalent to an in-person conversation – but (for specific industries only!), there isn't really.

One could even say that the status quo is a huge scope creep in terms of the original intent of the regulation, which was apparently focused more on "things one intentionally writes down", not "things that got written down because that's just the medium in which a conversation happened" or "things that were recorded because it's technically feasible" [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-09-28/the-de...

As cheap as storage is, we're going to end up in a situation where every business with >100 employees is expected to have cameras and microphones recording and transcribing every conversation just in case people might be communicating outside email and chat.

Many of the senior mandatory corporate trainings I've been to, often led by lawyers, basically state that "e-mail is evidence-mail" and to watch what you send.

> You literally have yearly training on how you have to communicate and in hugely impacts how people work because one dumb one off comment in email can financially end the company when an accident occurs.

Wow, that's a very sad contrast to the blameless failure analysis culture of aviation accidents/incidents I've heard so much about (and actually see as a model for what we should strive for in software).

I can't even begin to imagine what kind of organizational chilling effect this must have on the way problems are discussed.

> Because this form of evidence destruction is viewed as legal by the courts if you're not a "highly regulated" business like a bank, [..…]

Which is exactly the crux of the problem.

Why do we have two completely opposite regimes for arguably not very different types of organizations?

Intentionally short data retention policies should be illegal – but obviously that's completely infeasible in the US with its incredibly expensive legal discovery process, so that would be the first thing to fix.

On the flip side, even regulated industries should get to have a digital equivalent of an unmonitored "conversation on the golf course/in the elevator" etc. – or do we seriously want to incentivize that in a world where we're rethinking physical offices?

> Most companies don’t have an issue with clear communication because they’re not worried about what’s being said will end up part of a criminal investigation.

Only if you count "most companies" by company, i.e. most companies are therefore small businesses. And of course they're not worried because they're small and not subject to these kinds of investigations. They're not profitable enough to be targets.

But if you count "most companies" by where most people work, you're talking about medium-to-large corporations. And it's standard these days to have policies exactly like Google's, to not retain instant messages for example, and delete e-mails after a short number of years. Because they're big juicy targets for frivolous lawsuits.

So no, this isn't a win-win. People say dumb stuff all the time that a lawyer can take out of context. That doesn't mean a corporation is a criminal organization, as you suggest.

Corporations sue each other all the time, not because the corporation being sued is criminal, but because the corporation suing thinks it'll be able to get away with it. But you seem to be ignoring that.

Except it actually is a false equivalence.

Depends on the specific circumstances, but the prosecutors are usually happy to focus on the company, because it has the money to pay out a big settlement (which is how these things usually end).

A corporation is just a business incorporated as a separate legal entity.

If there were huge "unfair" advantages to being incorporated, then surely "normal" businesses would simply pay the modest fee to incorporate.

Seems to me the solution is end the liability shield incorporations provides.

Exactly, the legal system's job is not necessarily finding the truth. It's who can convince the judge/jury better even if they use nasty tactics.

I am also fairly sure employees are generally not personally liable.

The issue here is while employees aren't personally liable if they discuss Google wrong doing, Google is liable, which causes the culture of secrecy and deletion.

So the comment I was replying to is kind of wrong about "liability" and the root cause here. Because yeah..Google isn't gonna not be liable for stuff they as an organization of people do. That can't be helped.

>The problem is that most employees are not lawyers so they cannot make a proper legal judgement on their routine works.

but the executives are much closer to understanding the legal issues, so when an unsophisticated employee suggest something that is against anti-trust, the boss should say "no, we can't do that, it's anti-competitive"

the issue is not speaking against interest, it's engaging in illegal behaviors.

I've never really been amenable to simple moral plays, the contrarian in me says they hide more than they obscure.

It's moving and feels true, I have a particular dislike for credit card processing, but when I stop myself, I cannot think of a single practical example of how credit card processing has tightened rather than loosened over time. Separately, despite despising the ex. absurdity of AmEx getting 5% of the restaurant check because they pay off their customers, their profit seems attributable and proportionate to the credit risk taken on, there aren't really signs of significant market power

Fwiw I don't mean like visa MasterCard, I mean like Citibank, Deutsche. Basically anyone who would have been in headlines in 2008 or has custodial responsibilities for $X00 billion.

> If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.

Legal battles can be very expensive, even if you are not actually in the wrong.

Suppose a group of people agree amongst themselves to work together to produce and sell a good or service.

Are these people entitled to the rights you're talking about? They're people, so I think you must say that they are.

OTOH, to all intents and purposes these people are behaving like a corporation. How can it be that corporations are denied those rights, but groups of people that behave exactly like corporations -- that are corporations, in all but name -- are entitled to them?

> There's nothing here to be curious about, just the usual "corporations bad"

I'm sorry to be abrupt, but thats not true. We can see that empirically. For instance, you are talking to someone who read it and thinks that's a simplistic caricature of what they said.

So we can dispense with the idea your rephrasing is equivalent. That's indisputable.

There's a good quote about this in Rand, something something faced with a contradiction check your premises. When we jump to these kind of reactions, it's an annoying responsibility to pause and sigh, and engage on some level beyond "I'm sick of people saying (something they didn't say)"

There are lots of vague things, the idea that if something you said could be used against you in court you must have done something wrong (the only thing to which I was responding) is not one. Prosecutors are just as overzealous in civil cases as legal. Innocent things said at work can be used against someone just as well as ones said at home and in all the same ways and for all the same reasons.

What’s the famous Cardinal Richeleu quote?

I responded only because “corporations bad” is a mind virus deeply inculcated in a lot of people here, but those same people mostly would never think that just because something you said could be used against you in court that you did something either morally wrong or illegal. I wanted people to see the effect the mind virus had on their thinking.

Did anyone? No idea, probably not.

But it’s not a false equivalence at all, all the same reasoning applies whether your communication was at the office or your house, and whether it was about your dog or your code.

There are very many non-nefarious, completely legal reasons one might not want a work communication to be visible down the line, just as with personal. If someone can’t see that their thinking is cloudy and I bet they experience cognitive dissonance.

> End result is dysfunctional and compartmentalized companies. And ultimately the cost for all of this will be borne by everyone.

Only once they get really big though. And maybe that's OK. While it increases the price of goods from that company, it lets smaller companies compete without the larger companies straight up ignoring the competition. Letting large players continue to dominate is worse for the cost experienced by everyone else.

I’ve worked at and seen multiple companies with 10+k employees that have the attitude I was talking about, it’s not just a small or mid sized company thing.

I have also been told internal communication is more likely to be beneficial in lawsuits. It’s not because you’re intentionally hiding stuff, but because your employees have a viewpoint that is more likely to align with your interests than a 3rd party.

> People say dumb stuff all the time that a lawyer can take out of context.

Stuff taken out of context is rarely very persuasive when you can provide that context. It’s far more damaging to their credibility than your case.

I use this all the time. People say “the government wants…” or “Republicans did…” (you can pretty much play this like mad libs) and I say “wait, the government is an organization comprised of people, who specifically wants that?” And then they say {insert other nebulous group here} and I point out the same thing.

And then either they give up out of frustration and think I’m dissembling or they start to think about the problem differently.

Because corporations are bad that’s why!

That would be a great way to tank the economy.

It’s clearly not indisputable as it has been disputed. And I was responding directly to something someone did say. (That person did not say that the same logic doesn’t apply out of the office, I did infer that part.)

But both the “corporations are bad” mind virus (which is no more interesting than flat earth theories) and the idea that individuals want and deserve privacy even when acting morally and legally are so widely held here that I’m sure that Venn Diagram is like 90% the overlap part. The post to which I was replying may not be in it, I have no idea.

I wanted to point it out so people could see it clearly in case anyone caught it. I’m sure a lot of people felt some cognitive dissonance by agreeing with both and didn’t realize it, as one rarely does.

The original idea to which parent was replying actually was interesting. If nothing can be deleted, corporations (and people, when not at work) can be hampered and pushed into other forms of communication, other actions, etc. which can then even grow to be nefarious. That one’s interesting, “if what you said could be evidence then you did something wrong just because you were at work” isn’t, it’s just silly. It’s child logic.

"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him."

I would guess you haven't had to experience such an unfair situation personally as you still have that young/naive optimism about the world. If you ever find yourself entangled in some legal technicality, you will realize that that is a really bad idea.

On a similar note, never talk to the police, no matter how lawful you may think you are.

Won't LLMs make this really easy?

"Hey ChatGPT, find quotes in this 6 TB of chats to support my argument"

This isn’t just me talking, this is internal legal advice at multiple large organizations who have been through a great number of lawsuits. It basically boiled down to document everything.

"Google produced 13 times as many emails as the average company per employee did before it was a decade old, Kent Walker, Google's top lawyer, testified in the Epic trial. Google felt overwhelmed, he said, and it was clear to the company that things would only become worse if changes weren't made."

According to Google's own testimony this is a Google problem not a problem shared by the other average companies that produce 13 times less email per employee than Google.^1

A reasonable person might suggest that the company's employees try to produce less email (and instant messages) like other companies.

Instead, a crook might agree that the company destroy email (and instant messages), potential evidence, immediately after being created.

But Google does not do that by default for the public with Gmail and its instant message services. Maybe because the average user is not a crook.

1. Google probably has far more than 13 times the amount of storage capacity than the average company.

Destroying potential evidence at a company is what it is. It is not like there are multiple ways to interpret it. Google did it even after they knew they were being inestigated.

That's not how any of this works, at all. Please take the time to at least take a look an introductory Wikipedia article about the legal system. (For starters, "pleading the fifth" applies only to testimony of a human being which may cause him to be personally accused of a crime. It has zero relevance to the question of accessing archived emails and chat logs sitting on a hard drive which is owned by a corporation accused of a civil violation.)

Possibly? I wouldn't bet on lawyers billing any less per page of document discovery either way.

This comment would make sense if all companies communicated like Google does, but they don’t. Most companies have remarkably open internal conversations.

This quote is frequently misinterpreted. It is not a comment on the mutability of language in general, it is a comment on centralized authoritarian power, which the Cardinal sought and wielded. Because he personally wielded so much power, he needed only the flimsiest excuse to condemn someone.

The U.S. legal system does not empower prosecutors in this way. They are free to provide quotes out of context, of course, but defense counsel are just as free to provide the missing context, and neither actually gets to make the decision to convict.

Some of them are bound to if there is free market competition going on. Anyways, they are certainly not going to let 6 million documents get in the way of a big settlement.

You're right, it doesn't, but judging from how SEC enforcement actions work, banks often get nailed based on the contents of those required-to-be-recorded communications.

And the SEC will even fine financial institutions for having work-related conversations outside of the official recorded channels.

Of course we're talking about communications between people, but the record of these communications is used to find fault with the company, usually, not with the individual people. I think that's a really important distinction.

So I agree with the person who said this was a false equivalence.

Corporations exist at the pleasure of the people; we can and should impose any and all requirements and restrictions on them necessary to ensure they do not amass too much power and act to the detriment of regular citizens. We've failed in that, and we see the negative consequences of that daily.

You should trust that better search tools than LLMs exist for large collections of documents for legal discovery.

> Innocent things said at work can be used against someone

No, they can be used against the corporation. And that's totally fine and proper.

> There are very many non-nefarious, completely legal reasons one might not want a work communication to be visible down the line, just as with personal. If someone can’t see that their thinking is cloudy and I bet they experience cognitive dissonance.

No cognitive dissonance here. I just don't consider private/personal speech to be the same thing as work-related speech. I think the former should be protected from prying eyes (including the government) with as much zeal as we can muster. But the latter? No, there is no reason or need to hold that stuff sacred, and many reasons related to accountability to ensure it's recorded and available for legal challenges.

The previous poster is likely alluding to PornHub removing all the ‘good stuff’ because of Visa/MC.

Yes, corporations are groups of people, but they are also legal entities that have been given certain rights, responsibilities, and restrictions.

On top of that, we usually consider the corporate entity legally liable for thinga the people do in the name of the corporation. That doesn't come from "just a group of people". That comes from a specific legal structure we've decided on as a society.

Visa and Mastercard are not financial institutions subject to strict recordkeeping requirements because they don’t hold deposits or securities, issue credit, or control large amounts of capital. All they do is route payments.

There are undoubtedly reasons they are so dominant today, but storing old emails and chat logs is probably not one of them.

It's not, though. It's people in an entirely different context, acting as an agent of a legal entity that is regulated and has restrictions on the things it can do.

This is the same reason why I think police should be recorded when they are out on duty. A person gets to have the right to privacy, but the police, while on duty, should not have that right, given that they have the ability to legally kill someone, among other things.

If you (police, large corporation) are granted the legal ability to do harm on a large scale, then you also need checks to ensure those abilities are not being abused.

> Exactly, the legal system's job is not necessarily finding the truth.

The system purpose is to try and find the truth, because that helps society function, but is imperfect. It is good enough, so far, to keep society functioning, though its imperfection allows injustice to happen.

> It's who can convince the judge/jury better even if they use nasty tactics.

The adversarial system[1] does result in nasty tactics emerging, and I think there is room there for improvement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system

Well there's a balance. You get some really nice benefits from incorporating, but you also suffer some be restrictions.

Some businesses decide the benefits outweigh the restrictions, others do not.

Then anyone with money will be too afraid to invest or operate a corporation. Rapid, screeching halt to the economy.

Don’t underestimate a federal prosecutor. Perhaps we need a new saying: “If you give me six lines from the US Code, I can get a plea bargain from the most honest of men.”

I agree

> Google produced 13 times as many emails

Feels like a suss statistic. Counting the emails I have sent/received is as meaningful as counting network packets. Which dev working on services hasn't accidentally sent themselves 40k email alerts? Well, a few I imagine, but certainly not this one!

I am exactly in that line of work and that's not my experience. All our written communication is kept basically forever in case of investigation, and yet people don't second guess everything they write.

At the same time I've never seen anyone knowingly defend anything unsafe or illegal anyway.

And my experience is that the "blameless" culture is very present.

To carry through the analogy, yes, people should be afraid to deliberately and intentionally knowingly conduct illegal activity under the guise of a company.

Liability shields aren’t about knowingly committing illegal activity. They don’t protect against that. You can’t just form a company and hire people to rob banks or whatever.

Companies are to shield people from unknowingly or accidentally causing damage or committing a crime, and losing more than the capital already invested. Think situations like ‘I hired a driver, and he got drunk when I wasn’t looking and accidentally ran someone over’.

Without a liability shield, every investor or manager/owner of that company could lose everything, even if there was no way they could have known or prevented the problem - except by literally not having done business at all.

You are addressing something I did not say. See the quote to which I replying.

Yeah it's amazing how we bend over backwards to make sure things work smoothly for big corporations, but simply accept the inefficiencies intrinsic to mom and pop shops. It's very important to society that huge concentrations of power be monitored for abuse of said power, therefore the inefficiency of all communications being kept is intrinsic to big corporations.

> Some of them are bound to if there is free market competition going on.

I trust the free market to solve over-litigation about as much as I trust it to prevent over-treatments in dentistry.

Free markets work well in many cases, but self-regulation that directly diminishes the total addressable market is not exactly common.

> they are certainly not going to let 6 million documents get in the way of a big settlement

No, but the loser will pay for their discovery – and after at most a few steps of indirection, by extension all of society.

yes except that in a third of companies, it will be HR agents and senior management that watches those things, with AI now of course

I call BS. You don't think your annual mandated training on speech and communication has in any way impacted discussions? Seriously? Does your company let people from the factory floor reach out (continuous improvement style) via electronic communication for every idea/improvement/thought? If you don't think the insurance company approved annual communication training doesn't change what/how things are reported from the factory floor you should go walk the floor and talk to people.

According to some at the DoJ, there are usually individuals liable for these sorts of violations: https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/826721/dl

You could just as easily say “people don’t matter, people are just a collection of cells. You can’t predict a person without understand how their cells behave”, which clearly is a ridiculous statement. Structure really matters, at all scales, and the way a collection of entities behaves often diverges significantly from what you would get looking at individual entities in isolation.

Imagine your parents get on a plane and it crashes due to a malfunction. Then imagine five years later the maker of such plane had communications where an employee said "i think something is wrong with x. we should pause work on x" and their manager said "no, the tests with x are within range. you should continue". Then the relatives of people in the crash sue.

I'm not saying who is at fault or who is liable (that's for a judge to decide) but you don't think that communication should be in court? Do you really know the depths that capitalism will go to to make a dollar off of you and everyone you know?

We don’t have such annual training on communication. We do have annual trainings (including on ethics and safety typically), but none related to speech or an insurance company. The only recurring instruction we receive about speech is to “speak up” if we see anything wrong.

You’re probably thinking of a particular company that I don’t have experience with, but it’s not applicable to the whole industry.

Isn't there a third option?

Where those statements are available to the plaintiff to evaluate for evidence of, but the underlying communication is not allowed to be presented to the jury because it is prejudicial until it is established that the x had a real foreseeable issue?

> OTOH, to all intents and purposes these people are behaving like a corporation. How can it be that corporations are denied those rights, but groups of people that behave exactly like corporations -- that are corporations, in all but name -- are entitled to them?

A collection of individuals operating in principle like they’re an LLC, but not contained within an LLC, don’t get the protections that an LLC get. They get individual personal unlimited liability.

For the same reasons that me operating as an individual gets taxed as an individual, but me operating through a LLC wrapper gets taxed as an LLC.

We’ve made up these arbitrary rules whereby LLCs (sometimes) get a different set of rules to real people.

> in the current legal environment

Has somthing changed? The current legal environment seems to favor corporations and deep-pocketed litigants. The US Supreme Court keeps giving them more and more power, including free speech, freedom of religion, unlimted political donations, etc.

It's not journalists that have weaponized the law, it is corporations. The assertion that the overwhelmingly powerful are victims is awesome propaganda - attack the other side (with what you are guilty of), change the subject, etc.

With the likely coming war on journalism, I'm sure this will be a popular talking point. Maybe it's being previewed now?

True, this is an important distinction that I neglected to mention.

Nevertheless I don't see liability or tax differences as fundamental: I think that, even if there was no legal concept of a corporation being a (kind of) person with special protections, functionally similar structures could and would arise. We already have liability-waiving EULAs everywhere for software, which 99% of people accept without a second thought; perhaps this concept would be much more widespread.

I also think that most people who complain about "corporations" don't carefully distinguish them from other ways of clumping people together for business reasons, like partnerships or trusts -- I think the resentment is mainly around the size and wealth of these clumps. And I think that the differentially wealth-generating tendency of all these people-clumping arrangements comes primarily from the efficiencies (and additional possibilities) afforded by letting the people in them specialise their work, rather than from liability and tax differences.

But admittedly that's my own speculation.

> it needs to be balanced by making the penalties for companies engaging in vexatious and/or abusive litigation and vexatious discovery tactics very, very harsh. Megacorps would dislike both of those things happening to them, so we'll never see it.

Megacorps are the leading practicioners of abusive and vexatious litigation, often against small litigants who can't afford to defend themselves.

> And the result is that the financial industry is basically untouchable. Everything is buried in so much red tape that it's impossible to compete.

The financial industry possibly has never had more money or power. And now we are painting them as victims? Who is more powerful?

> If anything you ever say during routine business operations can end up as evidence, clear and honest communication will suffer

Just pick up the phone or meet in person and speak plainly.

I don't know, looking back in over two decades of my career in the industry, I can hardly think of any communication that, if it ended in evidence, would constitute any trouble. Sure, some would be embarrassing for me personally, revealing me asking stupid questions, making wrong decisions and being responsible for some failures, but that's life. There would be some commercial secrets, sure. But noting that I would need to work hard to conceal.

Maybe that's because I am a low level code monkey and communications in the higher spheres are full with nefarious plans about how to do illegal stuff and suppress competitors - but honestly I never observed anything close to a picture that you are painting.

Good thing we're not in the absolutist monarchy now, and have such things as courts and laws.

In this case, hiding your chats is not exactly going to help you. If anything, it will be showing up prominently in the list of charges against you as destruction of evidence and impeding investigation.

Not illegal per se, but if you're under a preservation order and specifically instruct someone to use disappearing messages to evade it, it can get a bit iffy.

NB: That's attributed to Richelieu, and AFAIK it's not something specifically that he said, though it seems to be in the spirit of much of his practice.

Something of which I'm aware as I've featured precisely that quote on a number of my profiles across the Internet under this 'nym.

For criminal actions in the US, at the least, what you do say can be held against you.

What you don't say cannot, and what communications you destroy (as part of an ongoing general "document management" policy, not as a specific response to a lawful demand for records) cannot.

However if you phrase your document management policy as "apply these guidelines so that our illegal activity cannot be documented by us as illegal" you will be having a Bad Day should that policy come before a prosecutor, Grand Jury, or court.

Rather famously, that sentiment is parlous close to something Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) once said, which makes the irony deliciously palpable:

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...> (2009).

> What’s the famous Cardinal Richeleu quote?

Among other things in my past, something a colleague reminded me of as we were going through special training, since the work we were doing had specific training and guidelines for communications, on top of the normal training and guidelines for communications, due to our team working on specifically 'compliance' oriented modules.

Ironically, it did not impact the teams ability to raise concerns or deal with bugs/etc. It was primarily about being clear about messaging in certain contexts, and it wasn't hard to deal with.

> I responded only because “corporations bad” is a mind virus deeply inculcated in a lot of people here,

I'd argue more people are unhappy with the way your typical modern corporation is run, speaking of...

> but those same people mostly would never think that just because something you said could be used against you in court that you did something either morally wrong or illegal

It would be interesting to ask what subset of those people have had to give all their social media account info on application/hire to the job so that HR can keep tabs on them...

I got ahead of myself here, just a bit. Let's go back to:

> the idea that if something you said could be used against you in court you must have done something wrong (the only thing to which I was responding) is not one.

Hard to say based on the muddling of the 'you' here.

Is the 'you' in this statement something the company did? Something you did under (potentially ever-implicit) duress of losing employment? It's hard to respond accurately without knowing the context.

> There are very many non-nefarious, completely legal reasons one might not want a work communication to be visible down the line, just as with personal.

Yeah but at the same time all parties need to protect themselves, and that includes the corporation. As a realistic example, a business may need to retain Teams conversations for an extended period of time, for instance if someone decides to file some sort of EEOC or Harassment claim down the line. If the claiming employee is pulling messages out of context, the full history may aid the defense of the business.

Yet, if the business retains those conversations, they cannot hide them on subpoena.

And, having dealt with more than one attempt at 'character assassination' I can say I'm glad I live in a one-party consent state for recording.

> If someone can’t see that their thinking is cloudy and I bet they experience cognitive dissonance.

Nope I just know to stand by what I say. I've had some managers that don't appreciate the 'level of detail' I include in certain emails, but 90% of those are clowns that were looking for me to, shock, shock, not have enough context to a statement so they could fire or ostracize me by, as you say, 'six words out of context'. At least if I give the full context with the communication, I can point at that and they look like an idiot instead of getting rid of the person politely trying to steer them away from incompetence.

> But, I don't see any realistic alternative to what Google is doing in the current legal environment.

They could not commit crimes. They could not conspire to commit crimes in the future. They could be happy with having won business and stop committing crimes.

As much as I dislike corporations I dislike a tyranny even more. A cooperation is not magic, they are just collections of people. Each person in a cooperation should be afforded the same rights as each person outside a cooperation. Are your personal phone records, emails, text messages stored /just in case/ you commit a crime?

Once you define a class as having less rights (for better or worse) you've created a breach.

The 4th and 5th Amendment:

  4th: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

  5th: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

If we're talking about people then we are talking about people. Slapping the word cooperation on a group of does not (should not) change their inherent rights against improper search and seizure.