Federal judge vows to investigate Google for intentionally destroying chats
theverge.com... On Friday, Judge Donato vowed to investigate Google for intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence, calling the company’s conduct “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” We were there in the courtroom for his explanation. ...
I’m really not in love with the headline, which is admittedly The Verge’s own. The judge didn’t say he was going to “investigate” Google independently. Judges don’t have that power. He said he’d “get to the bottom of” the spoliation question later. He’s saying that Google had better be prepared to deal with this issue much more fully in trials to come, but for purposes of this one, he’ll settle on giving the jury an instruction about permissible inferences.
In other words, Google had better be ready to receive the mother of all sanctions motions (possibly sua sponte).
From the article:
“I am going to get to the bottom of who is responsible,” he said, adding he would pursue these issues “on my own, outside of this trial.”
What's that if not an investigation?
An order to show cause?
I guess you could call that an “investigation,” although it feels weird to me. By “on my own,” he has to be referring to sanctions power. He has no authority to just go a-sleuthing. “Outside of this trial” means he’s not going to disrupt trial proceedings with an order to show cause, even though he could, because some of the sanctions available to him include things that would immediately impact this trial (from a mandatory inference jury instruction up to default judgment).
> Google declined to comment to The Verge on Judge Donato’s statements. Walker testified in court that the auto-delete setting is now off by default for all Google employees.
He's stated that, by default, it's disabled. Is it also now disabled for people who have modified the setting prior to this, and have any policies regarding auto-deleting messages been put into place ...?
> He's stated that, by default, it's disabled
That’s the case now, it wasn’t the case at the end of 2022 iirc, back when the investigation started. It was “history off” (aka “autodelete on”) by default for all 1:1 chats.
I had to manually turn on history for every single chat i was starting with a person i haven’t messaged before.