Outdated technology, codenames, and paranoia have marked the better part of the last two decades at Google (GOOGL).
A New York Times (NYT) report published Wednesday shows the lengths Google employees, from rank-and-file workers to executives, took to keep sensitive information off the books.
“Google had a top-down corporate policy of ‘Don’t save anything that could possibly make us look bad,’” Agnieszka McPeak, a professor at Gonzaga University School of Law, told the Times. “And that makes Google look bad. If they’ve got nothing to hide, people think, why are they acting like they do?”
The tech giant faced to major antitrust cases this year brought against it by the Department of Justice, one focusing on its search engine dominance and the other on its online advertising business. In August, a federal judge ruled that Google violated antitrust laws by monopolizing the online search engine market.
Exhibits in the cases, analyzed by the Times, paint a picture of a strict culture of secrecy that Google employees maintained — both for the company’s sake and their own. This included turning their chat history off, which would essentially wipe any private online conversations between workers.
“How do we turn History off?” Adam Juda, a vice president for product management, said in one chat in 2020. “I don’t do History on 🙂.”
When one employee, in a separate instance, asked: “ok for me to keep history on here? need to keep some info for memory purposes,” Danielle Romain, vice president of Google’s user privacy team Trust, replied: “Not OK.”
“The discussion that started this thread gets into legal and potentially competitive territory, which I’d like to be conscientious of having under privilege,” she said. “I’d like to stick to the default of history off.”
Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said at an August hearing for the ad case that Google employees “referred to these off-the-record chats as ‘Vegas.’ What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” according to the Times.
In another case, an executive wanted to take communications entirely offline. In 2017, Robert Kyncl, at the time the chief business officer at Google-owned YouTube, asked his boss, Susan Wojcicki, if she had a fax machine at home because he had “privileged doc” and “just didn’t want to send email.”
Now, Google could face being broken up over antitrust concerns. To address Google’s monopoly in the search engine market, the Justice Department said in a court filing last month that it’s looking for remedies that would prevent and restrain any present and future maintenance of its dominance.
Actions being considered included “behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features.”
Regulators are reportedly recommending that it sell Chrome, given that it’s the most widely used browser worldwide and a critical way that users access Google’s search engine.