Even though internet giant Google stores the world’s information, it has kept a lid on its internal communications – telling employees to delete messages and not use certain words, a report claims. Is – to avoid antitrust lawsuits.
A New York Times report said the company has been implementing such strategies since 2008, when it faced antitrust investigation over an advertising deal with its then-rival Yahoo and sent a confidential memo to its employees.
“Google said employees should avoid speculation and satire and think twice before writing to each other about hot topics,” the report said. The report said employees have been asked not to comment until they have “all the facts.”
The Times said technology has also been changed. It said, “The setting on the company’s instant messaging tool was changed to “Off the Record.” An inadvertent phrase would be erased the next day.”
“How Google cultivated this antitrust culture is revealed in hundreds of documents and exhibits, as well as witness testimony, in three antitrust trials against the Silicon Valley company last year,” the report said.
It said testimony showed Google took several steps to eavesdrop on internal communications.
“It encouraged employees to write ‘attorney-client privileged’ on documents and to always add a Google attorney to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the attorney never responded,” the report said. yes.”
Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents, as mandated by US laws. The report said, “But Google exempted instant messaging from the automatic legal hold. If employees were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn over their chat history. According to evidence in the trials, Some did.”
Google has faced widespread criticism for its actions, with judges in all three antitrust cases punishing the company for its communications practices, the report said.
“Judge James Donato of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the Epic (2020 Epic Games) case, said there was ‘an underlying systemic culture of suppressing relevant evidence within Google’ and the company’s behavior in the report. “It was a direct attack on the fair administration of justice,” it said.
In another case involving the company’s advertising technology, a district court judge in Virginia commented that Google’s document retention policies were designed in such a way that “a lot of evidence is potentially destroyed”.
Google produced 13 times more emails per employee than the average company a decade ago, reports Google’s top lawyer Kent Walker testified at the Epic trial. The report quoted him as saying that Google was feeling overwhelmed and that it was clear to the company that things would get worse if changes were not made.
The 2008 memo said chat messages would be automatically erased, which was signed by Mr. Walker and engineering executive Bill Coughran.
Mr Walker was asked to explain Google’s behavior to the judge, the report said. The report said he denied that there was a “culture of concealment”, but said that one problem was that Googlers were unsure about the meaning of some words.
The report further states, “Last year, Google changed its procedures to include saving everything, including chats, by default. Employees can no longer turn off chat history, barring litigation.”
