<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>magicalist</author><text>You should note you&amp;#x27;re quoting the DOJ&amp;#x27;s argument, not a finding of fact. Google seems to be arguing that chats are different than other documents (informal and ephemeral, I guess?) and default auto-delete is reasonable for them.&lt;p&gt;Deciding that (and if it&amp;#x27;s worth sanctions if Google is wrong) is literally what&amp;#x27;s being asked of the judge.</text></item><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>Critical information which commenters here are missing:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure *required* Google to suspend its auto-delete practices
in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Google did not.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. This means that for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every
24 hours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mbrumlow</author><text>This is the problem with the digital world.&lt;p&gt;To me, a slack message or chat message is the digital equivalent to me going to your desk or talking to you at lunch in person.&lt;p&gt;Now we live in a digital world where because we can, we are now being told to record. How would this be any different than the courts demanding that all conversations be recorded via audio recording when not using a chat application.&lt;p&gt;I think the fair trade off is “if i have the document, then I will produce it” and a default policy of delete after x time would be tested no different than if you or I had a conversation in person.</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>magicalist</author><text>You should note you&amp;#x27;re quoting the DOJ&amp;#x27;s argument, not a finding of fact. Google seems to be arguing that chats are different than other documents (informal and ephemeral, I guess?) and default auto-delete is reasonable for them.&lt;p&gt;Deciding that (and if it&amp;#x27;s worth sanctions if Google is wrong) is literally what&amp;#x27;s being asked of the judge.</text></item><item><author>mjburgess</author><text>Critical information which commenters here are missing:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure *required* Google to suspend its auto-delete practices
in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Google did not.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. This means that for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every
24 hours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bragr</author><text>You&amp;#x27;re correct that the judge hasn&amp;#x27;t ruled yet. However, not very many people, lawyers or otherwise, seem to be buying what Google is selling here. These kinds of chats are routine in discovery and disappearing messages like on Signal have regularly gotten people in trouble with the courts. Google&amp;#x27;s argument seems to boil down to they are special because reasons? And if they were so certain it was permissible, they&amp;#x27;d still be doing it.</text></comment>