A big claim has been made about the search engine company Google. Troubled by America’s antitrust laws, Google has been claimed to have imposed several communication restrictions on its employees. There is also a claim that Google instructed its employees to delete their internal chats and not to use certain words in mutual text conversations.
What is the claim about Google?
A New York Times report claims that search engine company Google, which is currently facing anti-trust lawsuits in the US, reportedly told its employees that he his text Destroy evidence of messages and avoid using certain words during internal communication. The report claims that Google has been adopting such strategies to avoid anti-trust cases for almost 15 years.
According to the report, Google started adopting these strategies from 2008. , when the company came under legal scrutiny over an advertising agreement with its first competitor, Yahoo. At that time, a confidential memo was sent by the company, in which the employees were warned that the regulatory bodies could cite the words used in their mutual conversations, so the employees should not be afraid of any "hot topics" before writing on "think twice".
Told to avoid these words
In a memorandum issued in 2011, employees were told that "market share" "dominance" And "Victory" Avoid using words like. Employees were also asked not to include any information in any internal document. "attorney-client privilege" and include the company’s lawyers in the list of recipients. According to the report, this step was taken to cover Google’s system that did not preserve documents.
Actually, under government rules in the US, companies are required to preserve their documents if there is a possibility of legal action. It is mandatory to do. But Google’s internal communication system was changed in such a way that the option to delete chats was the default and it was up to employees facing legal action to keep or delete their chat history. p>What the court said
In the Google vs. Epic Games case, a California District Court judge on Google "Systematic culture of suppressing evidence" Accused of adopting. At the same time, another court in Virginia criticized Google’s document retention policies, saying that "A lot of evidence has been destroyed." At the same time, in another case, the Columbia District Court reviewed the documents withheld by Google in the name of privilege and concluded that these documents do not come under legal protection.
Google’s response< /strong>
Replying to these allegations, Google said that it has always taken seriously the responsibilities of presenting its documents and keeping them safe. The company also said that it trains its employees for the correct use of legal privileges. Google’s lawyer said in the court that the company made changes in its policies to bring transparency in the work of its employees and to avoid misunderstandings. He claimed in court that Google employees write more emails than those of other companies, which poses more challenges to investigators in finding evidence.
