<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>mike_d</author><text>Everyone bitches about it when they first start and eventually learns a better way. The culture is about creating explicit artifacts of knowledge (design docs, documentation, commit&amp;#x2F;review messages, etc) rather than trying to dig around in streams of consciousness hoping to find the bits of info you need later.</text></item><item><author>_huayra_</author><text>I haven&amp;#x27;t worked at Google, so maybe there are better channels than &amp;quot;chat that&amp;#x27;s holding everything together&amp;quot;, but I can&amp;#x27;t imagine that being unable to search a chat and look at who said what and when is useful. I use it all the time to look up some random useful command a coworker told me long ago that I neglected to write down, for instance, or to follow up with a long-stale thread to revive it.&lt;p&gt;I suppose that&amp;#x27;s what email and design docs are for, but I feel a lot of that &amp;quot;organizational glue&amp;quot; in chat is quite valuable. How do Googlers live without it?</text></item><item><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></item><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>saagarjha</author><text>This is such a Googler comment, because it applies to basically everything at the company. “Everyone hates this when they join, but eventually they’re enlightened of the better way to do things, and it’s all good.” Dude, no. People write docs about stuff they care about but nobody writes docs about the weird error they got once that they needed a workaround for or whether their internal tool is named after a Pokémon or their favorite food. Believe me, I worked there, it was a massive pain. To say nothing of sending your boss something at 4 PM on a Friday and it being as if you never messaged them when they opened their laptop on Monday.</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>mike_d</author><text>Everyone bitches about it when they first start and eventually learns a better way. The culture is about creating explicit artifacts of knowledge (design docs, documentation, commit&amp;#x2F;review messages, etc) rather than trying to dig around in streams of consciousness hoping to find the bits of info you need later.</text></item><item><author>_huayra_</author><text>I haven&amp;#x27;t worked at Google, so maybe there are better channels than &amp;quot;chat that&amp;#x27;s holding everything together&amp;quot;, but I can&amp;#x27;t imagine that being unable to search a chat and look at who said what and when is useful. I use it all the time to look up some random useful command a coworker told me long ago that I neglected to write down, for instance, or to follow up with a long-stale thread to revive it.&lt;p&gt;I suppose that&amp;#x27;s what email and design docs are for, but I feel a lot of that &amp;quot;organizational glue&amp;quot; in chat is quite valuable. How do Googlers live without it?</text></item><item><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></item><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>pyrale</author><text>&amp;gt; The culture is about creating explicit artifacts of knowledge&lt;p&gt;In the case of Google, the culture was, explicitly, about destroying potential evidence of wrongdoing [1].&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ia601707.us.archive.org&amp;#x2F;28&amp;#x2F;items&amp;#x2F;gov.uscourts.cand.364454&amp;#x2F;gov.uscourts.cand.364454.385.0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ia601707.us.archive.org&amp;#x2F;28&amp;#x2F;items&amp;#x2F;gov.uscourts.cand.3...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>