<story><title>Judge mulls sanctions over Google&apos;s destruction of internal chats</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/judge-mulls-sanctions-over-googles-shocking-destruction-of-internal-chats/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edarchis</author><text>&amp;quot;Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google&amp;#x27;s revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;They didn&amp;#x27;t ask employees to destroy evidence but to avoid retaining evidence in the first place. Not leaving sensitive information in logs, backups etc is quite reasonable, even if it would have been useful to justice here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>EMIRELADERO</author><text>This comment[1] provides a good explanation on why this analogy is absurd:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Chats at google by default have 24 hours of chat history. (That is, after 24 hours, the chat history is delelted.) You can opt in to having 30 days of chat history instead. And when under a legal hold, Google continues to delete chats in the 24 hour history mode, but will not delete chats in the 30 day history mode.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; That is, Google&amp;#x27;s theory here seems to be that if you have a policy to destroy certain letters and memos 24 hours after receiving or creating them, then you don&amp;#x27;t need to stop doing that and preserve them even if under a court ordered legal hold. But if your policy is to destroy certain documents 30 days after creating them, then you must stop deleting them and retain them if ordered by a court.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Which is....a.....theory!&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=35587100&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=35587100&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Judge mulls sanctions over Google&apos;s destruction of internal chats</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/05/judge-mulls-sanctions-over-googles-shocking-destruction-of-internal-chats/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>edarchis</author><text>&amp;quot;Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google&amp;#x27;s revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;They didn&amp;#x27;t ask employees to destroy evidence but to avoid retaining evidence in the first place. Not leaving sensitive information in logs, backups etc is quite reasonable, even if it would have been useful to justice here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ruined</author><text>no.&lt;p&gt;they were under legal obligation to retain that evidence, and were lying in court and claiming that they were retaining that evidence.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&amp;#x2F;recap&amp;#x2F;gov.uscourts.dcd.223205&amp;#x2F;gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.512.1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;storage.courtlistener.com&amp;#x2F;recap&amp;#x2F;gov.uscourts.dcd.223...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had &amp;quot;put a legal hold in place&amp;quot; that &amp;quot;suspends auto-deletion.&amp;quot; Indeed, during the United States&amp;#x27; investigation and the discovery phase of this litigation, Google repeatedly misrepresented its document preservation policies, which conveyed the false impression that the company was preserving all custodial chats. Not only did Google unequivocally assert during the investigation that its legal hold suspended auto-deletion, but Google continually failed to disclose—both to the United States and to the Court—its 24-hour auto-deletion policy. Instead, at every turn, Google reaffirmed that it was preserving and searching all potentially relevant written communications.</text></comment>