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How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

(www.nytimes.com)
154 points tysone | 4 comments | 20 Nov 24 11:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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getpost ◴[20 Nov 24 23:05 UTC] No.42199072[source]▶
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.

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Mistletoe ◴[20 Nov 24 23:12 UTC] No.42199118[source]▶
Is something like Signal disappearing messages illegal?

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

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1. riku_iki ◴[20 Nov 24 23:15 UTC] No.42199135[source]▶
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.
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2. simoncion ◴[20 Nov 24 23:29 UTC] No.42199241[source]▶
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.)

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3. lesuorac ◴[21 Nov 24 00:15 UTC] No.42199632[source]▶
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.

4. lxgr ◴[21 Nov 24 00:58 UTC] No.42199920[source]▶
> 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?