How Google Spent 15 Years Concealing Its Internal Conversations
How Google Spent 15 Years Concealing Its Internal Conversations
Trying to avoid antitrust suits, Google systematically told employees to destroy messages, avoid certain words and copy the lawyers as often as possible.
from #NewYorkTimes #NYT
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By David Streitfeld
#DavidStreitfeld has written about Google since it was a start-up. Nov. 20, 2024 Updated 9:19 a.m. ET -
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employees should refrain from speculation and sarcasm and “think twice” before writing one another about “hot topics.” “Don’t comment before you have all the facts,” they were instructed.
There is one core aspect of humanity that is missing in the modern world, ephemeral communication. If two people physically meet and talk. That conversation only exists for the length of the breath in their lungs.
It makes sense for businesses, to establish standard recording practices, including those for ephemeral communication. Think of signal and the auto expiring messages. As long as it's your standard business practice, that's okay. If you turned it on when you're trying to be sketchy, now you're not following business practice, and that's wrong...
This is the same reason lots of companies will have email auto delete after 3 months if not archived manually.
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None of this has to be inherently evil, any lawsuit will include discovery, which means every little textual conversation in the company chat will be examined and published to slander the company. Even if the company did nothing wrong. There will be some a****** in chat who says some s*** that looks bad as a headline. And that's exactly how it will be used