Google's guidance for this stuff was always in the form of "don't leave a trail", not "don't do it in the first place".

Sketchy stuff comes up on a list? "Let's take it offline", not "no, stop this now".

That kind of thing. It was systemic.

This verbiage is common at most large multinats, from my own experience and from what's been relayed to me by peers.

I never heard it at Microsoft, nor was there training about avoiding paper trails.

I was inducted within the last three years, and I remember specific recommendations by CELA to have a non-content-based email deletion policy and to never insinuate anticompetitive behavior in an email or on teams.

The implication was "don't do anticompetitive behavior, we don't need to", but the warnings were given.

Depends who you were discussing it with. In general, if it was a manager, executive, or lawyer hired post-IPO, it'd be "Let's take this offline." Pre-IPO engineer, SRE, or UX designer of any tenure and it'd be "We shouldn't be doing this."

What they probably don’t realize is the record of saying “lets take it off line” ie requesting change in communication media is suspicious in itself and much easier for humans or algorithms to find in discovery than whatever complicated scheme they were going to discuss that wouldn’t give good target keywords.

I don't know, it seems like it's probably better to take it offline than to have a whole argument about something that shouldn't be talked about in the first place. If you keep talking, they are just going to put more dubious speculation on the record.

Shutting this down is just good management.

A lot of laws are written so that you have to prove intent (for good reason) and often let’s take this offline doesn’t satisfy that requirement. There are plenty of reasons to discuss something in another forum without any intent to break any laws.

A growing company is mutually exclusive with a company that tells their employees to "not create things that will crush or destroy competitors in the first place."

Even so, I still saw my Google manager's emails in the Oracle trial: http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/heres-mountain-of-willful...

A quick search for the word Facebook on that website reveals an uncomfortably pro-Facebook and anti-Google stance, couched amidst lots and lots of other stuff so the pattern cannot be discerned unless someone actually does a search. If the author is truly neutral as he claims, Facebook must be a saint when it comes to patent applications, which would be completely out of character. Or the author may be sponsored by a Google competitor who just happens to be pro-Facebook. Hmm... I wonder who that company might be.

Not that it makes Google's actions any better. But nowadays I doubt every single self proclaimed independent entity.

Yeah, Wall Street has much more experience in this. Whenever there would be something illegal to discuss, there’d be a phone call between our personal cell phones (company lines were recorded).

I've known a few CEOs of publicly traded companies, and they seem to have a "trap phone" with a rolodex of all the people they're not supposed to be talking to. Such as CEOs of direct competitors who they totally don't call to coordinate market strategy.

Also the most common 5 words heard on police scanners these days. ("Call me on my cell.")

These people should be in a cell.

Yeah really cops should not be using personal cell phones on duty. Don't know why this is allowed. Everything should be sent thru police radio and recorded.

Police IT is beyond awful. All of the cool toys are grant funded, so they build lots of stuff and maintain nothing. Operational funding is nonexistent.

The camera a detective I know was issued was a Canon Elph from 2003. They all use personal smartphones because the institutional equipment is limited and junky.

A surprisingly large number of people in the libor scandal were doing it openly in Bloomberg chat.

While true companies don't want to leave this kind of trail of actions, whether its in written form or not, ephemeral or recorded, people will have these kinds of communication. It's not like they should just ignore the competition or act via implicit understanding and winks and nods (they are not covered by anti-collusion like airline pricing is)

It's not surprising that big corporations are doing this kind of stuff. Their existence now relies not on productivity and efficiency but merely on raising the barrier to entry for competitors.

Corporations have already maxed out their capacity in terms of production efficiency; it's just really hard for them to coordinate so many employees efficiently. If coordinating large numbers of people was easy (and didn't become exponentially harder relative to number of people), we'd probably all be wealthy communists.

Instead of focusing on how to do their own job better, corporations have shifted their focus towards how to make it harder for competitors to do theirs.