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.

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!

> 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...

> 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.

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.

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).

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...

> 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.

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 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.

Won't LLMs make this really easy?

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

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 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