Judge James Donato: “The answer that is not no, the answer to that is yes, based on the record presented to me by the Google witness in January. That fact is carved in stone, don’t dance around it.”
“You’ve had the ability to flip a switch,” says Donato.
“In 2008 I was involved with our engineering team ... In the years since I’m not sure who was responsible for updating our retention policies,” he says, in response to a question about who was in charge of setting the 24-hour history-off retention policy.
He says it’s correct that legal holds did not change Google’s policy about automatically deleting chats.
Google chief legal officer Kent Walker’s reply:
I think for many years we used direction to employees because we felt that the overwhelming majority for use cases Talk or Chat [...] were not a high business utility, but where there was a litigation hold, we would issue specific directions to employees to retain those materials.
Google chief legal officer Kent Walker, to Epic attorney Lauren Moskowitz.
“A business retains records for as long as it needs for business purposes,” he says, suggesting the 24-hour default deletion period seemed adequate, “unless we thought there was some reason we’d need them.”
We’re looking at this email again, which Walker appears to be saying he co-wrote and confirms he co-signed.
He says part of the rationale for the email, which he says was sent during his first year as Google’s general counsel (a position he held from 2006 through 2018, he confirmed) was to set some standards for document retention.
Google employees used chat for substantive business discussions.
Google could have turned chat history to on as a default setting but chose not to.
Google did not follow up with the custodians in this case to audit or monitor their chat preservation decisions or practices.
Google [was] unable or unwilling to follow the instructions to preserve chats.
Each employee was effectively left to make his or her own call as to whether to preserve a chat communication or not.
And that’s before we even got to “fake privilege”. The judge says he found the testimony of a Google lawyer who discussed that last bit in court “to be evasive and not credible.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai passed the buck to him. Will the buck stop with Walker? We’re about to find out:
In an internal Google document introduced by Google’s own attorneys on Wednesday, Android security boss Dave Kleidermacher showed that at one point Android was deemed to be at “-18 percent” on privacy and security compared to iOS.
“The result of their scoring shows iOS has an 18 percent advantage,” he explained.
A passage from the same presentation read:
The Google Play vetting process is less thorough than Apple’s app review so more malicious apps are allowed onto the platform. While Google Play Protect should mitigate this problem, it is not always successful.
Most of the attorneys for both sides have already returned to the courtroom. I’ve got my trusty blue squishy laptop holder thingy. And Google chief legal officer Kent Walker should be on the way.
Elden Ring, Hades, Vampire Survivors, Dead Cells and Persona 5 can now wake up your Deck. (If you’ve ever spent $30 on Steam, you’ve likely already got enough points for a vid.)
Hey Moon Studios, can we get an Ori and the Will of the Wisps HDR one for Steam Deck OLED?
