Google is one of the largest entities on the internet, responsible for dispersing information and facilitating communication through its range of services, including Gmail. However, while it was busy helping hundreds of millions of users navigate their lives, it was also safeguarding itself by allegedly hiding key internal communications in anticipation of litigation, as reported by The New York Times.
The seeds of this approach appear to have been sown as far back as 2008, when Google faced antitrust scrutiny over an advertising deal with rival Yahoo. According to the Times’ report, Google employees were instructed to avoid sarcasm, speculation, and to “think twice” before discussing “hot topics” internally. This led the company to tweak its internal messaging tool to enable an “off the record” option, ensuring that any incautious messages would be deleted the next day.
“The memo became the first salvo in a 15-year campaign by Google to make deletion the default in its internal communications. Even as the internet giant stored the world’s information, it created an office culture that tried to minimize its own,” the report said.
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Discovered During Google’s Recent Legal Battles With Epic Games and the US DOJ
The New York Times stated that details about this so-called “distrustful culture” were pieced together by reviewing “hundreds of documents and exhibits, as well as witness testimony, in three antitrust trials against the Silicon Valley company over the last year.”
The report claimed that Google eventually took further steps to keep a “lid” on internal communications, including advising employees to label documents as “attorney-client privileged” and adding Google lawyers to recipient lists.
“Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents. But Google exempted instant messaging from automatic legal holds. If workers were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn their chat history on. From the evidence in the trials, few did,” the report added.
Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the Epic vs Google case, remarked that there was “an ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence within Google,” and that this alleged behavior was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.”
“An awful lot of evidence has likely been destroyed,” said Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, who is overseeing Google’s antitrust case concerning advertising technology.
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What Google Has to Say
Google, in a statement cited by The New York Times, said, that it (Google)“seriously our obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents. We have for years responded to inquiries and litigation, and we educate our employees about legal privilege.”
Additionally, the company claims to have presented “millions of documents” in its fight against the US DOJ alone.
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