How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

Two comments, directed to the majority of discussions:

a) It is ironic and indefensible how a company known for storing and gathering the world's information, engages directly in a massive evidence spoliation strategy in direct violation of the Duty to Preserve as outlined in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_37) That is deletes information.

“Google had a top-down corporate policy of ‘Don’t save anything that could possibly make us look bad,’” she said. “And that makes Google look bad. If they’ve got nothing to hide, people think, why are they acting like they do?”

b) I think and I hope we have not heard the end of this. There are worse things to do than being found as an individual to have violated anti-trust laws, I don't know say have actively setup and organized thousands of people to directly obstruct justice and destroy records to hide such actions: 18 USC §§1503, 1512(c)... (See https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1512)

"Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the Epic case, said that there was “an ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence within Google” and that the company’s behavior was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” He added that after the trial, he was “going to get to the bottom” of who was responsible at Google for allowing this behavior."

You have the DoJ and three judges looking at you with your pants down. I hope this is the beginning honestly, otherwise what message does it send to every other entity out there? Imagine this happening on any interaction you have as a consumer or employee.

> It is ironic and indefensible how a company known for storing and gathering the world's information, engages directly in a massive evidence spoliation... That is deletes information.

Not at all. Obviously, Google's mission is to organize the world's public information. You don't want Google organizing your personal Gmail for the world to see, do you? So why would you expect Google to organize its own instant messages for the world to see?

> You have the DoJ and three judges looking at you with your pants down.

Judges disagree with each other. All the time. Investigations often don't even make it to trial because there isn't a good case in the end. And just because you have judges investigating you doesn't mean you're guilty. Presumption of innocence and all that, you know?

I was watching Kennedy's (RFKjr's daughter) interview with Tucker and she talked about her first day at work at C.I.A. and instructions on how to tag emails. She said there was a huge drop down and she was told to just set a default (which turns out is the highest possible security setting) "even for things like 'want to go get a coffee?'" Quite clever since that set of emails will be an enormous pile of mostly useless chit chat with other matter buried in the mess.

This isn't really a special case. Google provides similar retention policy settings to other organizations that use Google Workspace [1]. Any large organization that's a target of lawsuits will likely find them useful.

[1] https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2990828?