In its antitrust case against Google, the Federal Government filed a list of chats it had obtained that show Google employees explicitly asking each other to turn off a chat history feature to discuss sensitive subjects, showing repeatedly that Google workers understood they should try to avoid creating a paper trail of some of their activities.
The filing came following a hearing in which judge Leonie Brinkema ripped Google for “destroyed” evidence while considering a filing from the Department of Justice asking the court to find “adverse interference” against Google, which would allow the court to assume it purposefully destroyed evidence. Previous filings, including in the Epic Games v Google lawsuit and this current antitrust case, have also shown Google employees purposefully turning history off.
↫ Seamus Hughes
The fact that corporations break the law, and lie, cheat, and scam their way to the top is not something particularly shocking, nor will it surprise anyone. I can barely even get angry about it anymore – birds gotta eat, fish gotta swim, corpos gotta break the law, that sort of thing. It’s just an inevitability of reality, a law of nature. You know it, I know it, the whole world knows it.
No, what really upsets me is just how easily they get away with it, and even if they do get punished, any fines or other forms of punishment are so utterly disproportionately mild compared to the crimes committed. It’s incredibly rare for anyone responsible for corporate crime to ever face any serious punishment, let alone jail time, and even in the rare cases where they do, they usually have some stock options or whatever left over from their employment contract that will ensure a lavishly wealthy lifestyle. Fines levied against corporations as a whole are usually so low they’re just a minor cost of doing business, to the point where one has to wonder why they’re even being levied at all.
Compare this to us normal folks, and the differences couldn’t be more stark. Whenever we’re accidentally late on some small bill, we get fined automatically, with very little recourse. We get a speeding ticket automatically in the mail because we drove 5 km/h over the speed limit. Our tax agencies are stupidly effective and efficient at screwing you over for that small side hustle selling crap on eBay. And rarely do we have any effective, efficient recourse.
And these things can quickly spiral out of control when you’re already living paycheck to paycheck – being poor is really, really expensive. And let’s not even get into how much worse any of this is if you’re part of a minority, like being black in the US, or of North-African descent in Europe.
In this case, the illegal activities of Google and its executies and employees is on such clear display, and yet, few, if any, will suffer any consequences for them. If you ever wonder why so many regular people flock to political extremes, it’s exactly this kind of deep unfairness and inequality that lies at its roots. It’s dispiriting, demoralising, and disheartening, and primes the pumps for disenfranchisement with society, and thus the search for alternatives, upon which extremists pray.
We either stop our continual slide into corporatism, or our societies will fall.
To be fair, Chat is a private communication medium, even if it is provided by the company.
And, personally I would not have wanted my chats to be dragged into court, along with myself. That is why many Google employees themselves preferred to use the privacy option.
Why not use another service like WhatsApp with e2e encryption then?
Basically convenience and trust.
Emails are on the other hand known and accepted to be official communications, and are subject to very long archiving and recording standards. So you needed to communicate with care (everything can be easily taken out of context).
Well, you call it fair, I call it naive.
Here’s the title of Microsoft Teams landing page: “Get ready for the future of WORK with Microsoft Teams” (emphasis added).
Should the justice department skip Teams chats when collecting evidence about BP?
Why should it skip Google employees’ chats on whatever the name of Google chat thing is that year? Or on WhatsApp? Or on Teams? Any communications between co-workers is evidence.
If you’re conducting business in an official capacity, then nothing you do is private. End of story! At least in the US, verbal agreements are considered contracts, so not even those are private. Essentially, Google is asking it’s employees to destroy official records, which, in most cases, is illegal. Anyone who follows such a directive is at best being unethical, and at worst implicating themselves in a legal tangle.
Speaking of ethics, I teach engineering courses at the local state college, and we are constantly beating ethics into our students… Ethics in the classroom, ethics at work, ethics in your personal life, etc. It’s mind boggling to me that we have an entire industry that seems allergic to the very through of ethics. I guess, in the end, there’s a reason they’re not real engineers. After all, when an engineers fails, the potential to kill dozens is very real.
teco.sb,
I’m unclear about the legal side. To me, technically “turning off history” doesn’t seem like the same as “destroying records”. Although suspicious, Is employees turning off history illegal?
Ah yes, I remember my ethics class beatings.
Yeah, just imagine if we made bridges, cars, sky scrappers, or airplanes.
cbsnews.com/live-updates/pittsburgh-bridge-collapse-frick-park/
motorbiscuit.com/possible-hyundai-kia-deadly-sudden-acceleration-problems-may-investigated/
nbcnews.com/news/us-news/interactive-see-after-photos-florida-condo-building-collapse-n1272299
nbcbayarea.com/investigations/series/millennium-tower/san-francisco-millennium-tower-foundation-sinking/3460782/
cbsnews.com/news/faa-halts-boeing-737-max-9-aircraft-alaska-airlines-door-midflight/
Alfman,
Agreed 100%. (See my longer response below)
Ethics is important. However ethics also include allowing people to have private spaces.
sukru,
I agree with that.
I do question who’s privacy is actually important here though. Imagine a scenario where instead of acting in the interests of the employer, employees are acting in their own interests. Employers have said employees don’t have an expectation of privacy using employer property, and the law would be on their side…
https://www.findlaw.com/employment/workplace-privacy/privacy-at-work-what-are-your-rights.html
So, as it relates to the discussion, the employee privacy rational seems fishy. Employees aren’t normally entitled to privacy from employers at work. How come employee privacy becomes important when they’re acting on behalf of the company?
These are mutually exclusive:
1) If employees have an expectation of digital privacy, then employer surveillance has got to go.
2) If employer surveillance has merit, then employees don’t have an expectation of digital privacy.
This seems like a case of having one’s cake and eating it too.
Alfman,
Yes, I see your point. However…
First of all I always assume there is a “keylogger” on my company system, even if there is none. Given the sensitivity of the data for the business operations, that makes sense.
And wrt. privacy from the company vs privacy from the government…
The worst thing a company can do is firing you
(unless there is gross misconduct, then of course that could lead to a lawsuit)
The government, on the other hand can really make your life miserable. And they do have double standards (what happens to politicians or bureaucrats when they delete actual evidence and computer records that they are told to keep?).
Do you really trust an entity that has hidden lists and secret courts with your private conversations?
teco.sb,
Destroying records, and not having records for everything are definitely not the same. One of them is criminal, the other one is context dependent.
We don’t keep notes for all meetings, including official ones. We also don’t make notes of “watercooler” conversations. I think this is pretty much the standard in all companies.
What Chat is doing is allowing remote versions of these interactions especially during and then after the COVID period. As I would not want my conversations not being recorded in a break room, … even if I am speculating about work topics… I would not want them recorded in a private chat either.
IF a particular meeting needs recording, then of course it should be recorded. But that is a different topic.
The government is upset since, they seem to have failed to find enough in regular, official channels, and they want to paint a false image and use this crisis to change the rules around private conversations. I don’t think I could agree with that.
✊
How’s that related to “OS” news?
Another thing is, corporations are people. It’s people who cheat, break the law, lie. Corporations aren’t living organisms, or at least the emergent systems that come out of people’s cooperation (like a corp) don’t fall into our definition of a living organism. It’s not like there is a good person, then they join a corp, and suddenly they become lying cheating scumbags.
antonone,
Maybe it’s a case of survivor’s bias though. Those determined to uphold morality over corporate selfishness get held back in the rat race to make profits at any cost. They are not the ones that become wallstreet darlings. This easily explains why corporations are the way they are.
I don’t think employees are should expect privacy when using company resources.
Regarding keeping history, there are probably laws related to what records companies are supposed to preserve and for how long. Also, employees probably follow company policies when it comes to enabling conversation history, probably dictated by corporate lawyers. People don’t argue with the company lawyers, especially when legal liabilities are involved.