How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

“ 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'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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Except it actually is a false equivalence.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.