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.

> 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.

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.

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.