This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I read the article, and it's way less bad than the title made it sound. They just set company chats to disappear after some number of days and told employees to not "comment before you have all the facts." This has been the policy of every company I've worked at, including university IT and Amazon.
The title made it sound like they were deleting specifically chats related to open court cases, which is like level 10 ultra-illegal.
And again, that should result in jail time for all of those executives and all employees that actually destroyed messages
JAIL THEM, JAIL THEM NOW, JAIL THEM LONG
This sort of shit behavior will never end and only get worse until we, instead of hand slapping, start jailing these fuckers.
Jail a bunch of CEO's for breaking the law and watch how fast they start behaving.
Either of us deliberately destroy data: locked up.
Company exec does the same: slap on the butt and a $2 fine.
We should all be on the same playing field!
First thing I do when I'm told to delete messages is SecureDrop them to the press
This is why companies have data retention settings to automatically delete old emails and slack/teams/etc. and special processes a classifications to store those communications that relate to contracts and such.
This is why compliance frameworks have retention policies that combat the natural desire companies have to destroy their own records and logs. SOX retention rules are directly the result of realizing Enron only could be busted after their emails were recovered.
Twice in my career I’ve been at an org where the legal team decided to destroy all emails over a year old and then a year or two later had the same company revert that rule after deciding to go public and being forced by SOX audits to start retaining records again.
Google is a public company, so depending on how far back they deleted, they could be in hot water with the SEC. You know, in a world where the SEC actually still did their jobs
I was gonna say, the SEC may as well not exist now.
Along with every other safeguard designed to protect the people from corruption.
The sundowning rapist felon traitor's handlers made sure of that.
Thats uh... thats a gigantic crime rofl, fucking wow.
Not quite sure exactly what that slots into, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, not complying with the discovery process... but uh yeah wow dang, that's the kinda thing that can actually lead to charges against the actual people that do this, if not at least the people that order other to.
Great job, morons!
... fucking megacorp version of 'the discord channel got leaked, nuke everything!', especially if these directives were newly enacted after any of the anti trust suits began.
Nah, nothing will happen. At worst they get slapped on the hands with a few million dollars, and no one will care.
Jail these fuckers, jail them for long times, jail them now
Musk is still free and has been openly doing this with self driving junk for years. This is the USA where we haven't had reasonable laws passed since the 1970s.
Not quite sure exactly what that slots into, tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, not complying with the discovery process.
Pretty sure that's a hat trick
These types of requests always backfire. We got a similar request when I worked for a very large corporation and the very first thing I did was create a backup of our Lotus Notes and take it home. Just in case.
And someone spoke up, right?
...
Right...?
Actually, yes. It led to a huge lawsuit and changes in legislation regarding 401k contributions.
Justice boner, my favorite
Just use Signal. You may be in Pete Hegseth’s next message.
He still hasn't added me to any chats. What should I do?
Have you tried being rich and incompetent?
Did you say in your profile you’re a reporter? Ahha
Nationalize google and incarcerate their board.
Eh, you sure we want to give control of that shit to Trump and his people?
I'm not sure whether it could be worse.
It would be worse. They would use that access to target people.
Do you think anything is stopping them now? Why do you think these systems were built?
I mean they were built to make money, the fact that you can send them a national security letter is just a happy accident that keeps the NSA from having to run more datacenters.
I respectfully disagree. They were built for power and control. Monestisation just paid for it and helped adoption.
I think you've got it backwards. Like the other person said, this shit was built to make money, the power and control came later. Said power and control also came partially from the money, since money is just power coupons, and they used that to buy up competitors and regulators alike to get to the state their in now.
Not everything is built with evil intentions. Quite frequently, evil corrupts otherwise benign institutions as they gain power to serve the ends of those already in power.
The encryption battles of the early 1990s focused primarily on two issues: restrictions on the export of encryption technologies and the National Security Agency’s (NSA) attempts to introduce a chipset called the Clipper chip to network technology. The first was the result of Cold War era laws designed to control the diffusion of sensitive technologies, including encryption software. This became an issue in the early 1990s when encryption software became commonplace in web browsers. In 1996, President Clinton signed an executive order that loosened restrictions after technology companies claimed that the export controls on encrypted products hurt their sales.
The National Security Agency (NSA) announced the Clipper chip in 1993. The chip was a piece of hardware designed for phones which would provide encryption on communications while also producing an encryption key and making it available to the NSA. After backlash from civil liberty groups, findings of technical vulnerabilities in the chip, and low adoption rates despite incentives, the program ended in 1996.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-brief-history-of-u-s-encryption-policy/
Profits. Dead people don't pay.
Dead people also have no claim on the present or future. You can own more, even when the pie is shrinking if you negate others claims.
they already are.
its been a while since snowden leaked that to us.
My dear child... They are already doing this. Us and Israeli spooks already infiltrated all mega corps. Mega corps know and collaborate.
All of them are balls deep helping waffen IDF do a genocide...
They help ice gestapo to target people within the US...
These examples are merely what has been publicly documented.
Yes, it's a lot worse. The particular difference is that one of these organizations has the power to disappear you without consequence.
I know people like to hate on google, but google is actually like 3 companies in a trench coat.
They do highly valuable open source / open ecosystem work (I will say the chance of you indirectly using a google tool without knowing is over 90% now) and if the American government, a capitalist fascist government no less, gets their hands on it, we're fucked
Not all of google is adsense or YouTube.
I hope there’s no Google in my life.
they already have these companies wiretapped since the early 2000s
I read this as "incinerate". A principled, pragmatic opposition to the death penalty in any case I can think of is the only reason I would disapprove.
I've always wondered, is this illegal? Like obviously it is if they've already been subpoenaed or something.
Nah it's illegal to deliberately destroy data to impede investigations. You don't need to have an open investigation for that to be the case.
It remains legal to get rid of old files to free up space or if you genuinely believe they aren't necessary, though, so you need to prove intent.
If there's a subpeona or something, their destruction is itself a crime, but under this law, its the intent to defraud the courts that's illegal, and that intent is always illegal.
The law exists specifically for this situation. Purging important business documents preemptively is clearly not OK.
Citation: https://legalclarity.org/18-u-s-c-1519-destruction-alteration-or-falsification-of-records/
Just to add, if it's found that evidence was destroyed, beyond potential seperate charges for the destruction itself, a judge would also typically give an averse inference instruction to the jury. That means the jury should assume that the destroyed evidence would have been damning to whomever destroyed it.
What that tells me is, assuming google acted rationally in the destruction, either they think they have a reasonable chance that they can beat the evidence destruction charges, or that the evidence is so damning that the reality of the situation is considerably worse than whatever adverse inferences might be drawn.
(I am not a lawyer, so please take my interpretation with a large grain of salt.)
No that seems likely.
Evidence that would damn them here being in a court record makes it admissible elsewhere for a crime that isn't even prosecuted yet.
They're cutting off their foot to save their leg, here, since this isn't particularly secretive, seeing how we know about it.
Do you happen to know when the last time was that a rich company was prosecuted for this?
It seems a lot like the perjury laws: there to scare poor people into telling the truth because of almost non-existant prosecution of it.
And if it is a fine and not jail time (white collar crimes are almost never jail time) the fine would have to be much larger than the penalties they would not have to pay because of the crime, otherwise it is simply a net win for the company
Companies don't get jail time.
Sure, technically an individual could, but generally the actual destruction is an employee doing what they're told to do. They're somewhat complicit but the real problem is the c-suite people.
I unfortunately don't know when this last happened or any specific details on what the penalty would be, but I feel fairly confident that this law falls under the "cost of doing business" part of illegal corporate activity. I wish it didn't.
It's white collar crime. They'll pay a fine which will mean nothing to them, and nobody will go to jail. That's how it works.
It's illegal if antitrust action is anticipated, according to the article. That said, I know that most places I've worked have had a document retention policy that called for automatic deletion of most documents after some time period, like a year.
It's illegal if antitrust action is anticipated
That seems like something that would be difficult to prove.
Unless they've received notification to that effect. "Hey, y'all, we're considering anti-trust so save that shit."
they weren't feeling lucky?
