had been brought up<\/a> by Epic Games in its ongoing trial which involves the Fortnite maker accusing Google of anticompetitive conduct with regard to its Play Store and rules over in-app purchases.<\/p>\nThis latest claim, however, has to do with the Justice Department\u2019s antitrust suit filed in 2020 against Google for monopolizing the search and advertising market.<\/p>\n
In it, the DoJ states that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure should have required Google to stop its practice of auto-deleting chat histories as soon as it anticipated the coming litigation back in mid-2019. But Google did not, the government claims. Instead, Google employees continued to be able to turn their messaging app\u2019s chat history from on to off anytime they saw fit.<\/p>\n
It explains that the program Google uses, Google Hangouts, an instant messaging product, offers a feature for \u201coff the record\u201d chats which are automatically deleted by the system after 24 hours. Google had even trained its employees how to use the feature to discuss sensitive topics instead of using emails, the filing says.<\/p>\n
It also points to a written policy weeks after the litigation was filed which authorized Google employees to control the preservation of their chat history by either selecting \u201chistory on\u201d chats which retained messages for 30 days to 18 months, depending on the user\u2019s selection, or the \u201chistory off\u201d texts that disappear 24 hours later. For one-on-one chats, the default setting is \u201chistory off.\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, the U.S. government alleges Google lied about its chat preservation policies, falsely claiming it had \u201cput a legal hold in place\u201d to suspend auto-deletion. The company claimed it was preserving all its custodial chats, the filing continues, but in reality, it failed to disclose to the U.S. government and the court anything about its 24-hour deletion policy, which continued up until this month \u2014 years after the case was filed.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we now know, over the last four years, Google routinely destroyed these written communications,\u201d the filing reads. \u201cIn fact, Google continued automatically deleting these \u2018off the record\u2019 chats after it reasonably anticipated litigation, throughout the United States\u2019 investigation, and even when the company became a defendant in this litigation\u2014 every 24 hours up until February 8, 2023.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of particular interest to Epic Games, the filing additionally references the Fortnite lawsuit as another example of this issue, noting that even after Epic had confronted Google with its concerns, it still withheld its 24-hour deletion policy from the U.S. government.<\/p>\n
The messages could have provided the Justice Department with key communications to support its case or names of witnesses to call. It\u2019s asking the court to remedy the situation by way of sanctions and wants the court to order Google to provide further information about the deleted chat practices, including written declarations and oral testimony, in advance of the requested hearing.<\/p>\n
The allegations here are notable not only because of the weight they have in the current antitrust litigation between Google and the government, but because similar concerns are also now being played out in the Epic Games trial. In the latter, the judge has already said he will not let Google \u201cget away with\u201d deleting the chats. At present, the court in Epic\u2019s case is still in the process of collecting additional chats from Google, including those related to the litigation as well as any others that mention terms like \u201csensitive,\u201d \u201chistory off,\u201d \u201chistory is not off,\u201d \u201chistory on,\u201d \u201chistory is on,\u201d \u201coff the record,\u201d or \u201con the record.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a new filing late last week, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that Google \u201croutinely destroyed\u201d an entire category of written communications in its antitrust investigation against the company. The communications \u2014 chat messages between Google employees \u2014 were deleted over the course of several years, the DoJ stated. A similar issue had been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-7292","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}