Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
The lawsuit in question dates back to October of 2020, and relates to allegations that Advertising Company Google tips the scales in their own favor when it comes to selling advertising.
It is not, I repeat not, related to the lawsuit that was filed in January of this year (2023) which relates to allegations that Advertising Company Google tips the scales in their own favor when it comes to selling advertising.
The DOJ alleges that at some point from when the lawsuit was announced until now, Google set its internal chat tool to auto-delete conversations between sensitive employees and executives after 24 hours, thus making it impossible to hand them over as evidence. This would have been fine pre-lawsuit, but unfortunately Google was mandated to keep any and all records that might be requested.
Google’s response to this was of course a flat denial, and a reminder that they “have produced over 4 million documents in this case.” How many documents were deleted over that span of time, of course, was not commented on.