“Directory deleted from Google for nearly four years”

The US Department of Justice has brought very serious charges against Google in the antitrust case we covered earlier:

“The US Department of Justice wants to dismantle the Google Ads business.”

Google claims deliberately destroyed evidence for nearly four years

According to the Department of Justice (“DoJ”), Google must have “systematically destroyed” its history of lightning notifications every 24 hours. If so, then there is tampering with evidence and destruction of evidence that likely could have been used in the case against the company.

The system should be like this for nearly four years. This means that only employees who have manually activated message history have their messages saved.

“They should have realized this.”

The DOJ believes that Google should have realized there was a possibility of a case against them, and that in the summer of 2019 they should have modified the default settings for storing all communications.

Investigators believe that Google falsely informed the authorities that it had arranged for the messages not to be automatically deleted.

Google has confirmed on each occasion that it has retained and searched all relevant and potentially relevant written communications.

Ministry of Justice

The Department of Justice is now asking the appropriate court whether Google violated federal rules by destroying snap messages. If successful, there may be penalties against Google.

This is Google’s response to the accusations

The advertising, product and research firm says there is no substance to these charges, and that they have “worked faithfully for years to respond to inquiries and court cases. We have already produced over 4 million documents in this case alone, and several million more to authorities around the world.”

According to CNBC, this isn’t the first time Google has been accused of this. In the Epic Games monopoly case against Google (in many ways, the same case they had against the Apple App Store), it emerged that the employee felt it was safer to discuss sensitive topics one-on-one or over the Google Hangout instant messaging service.