This latest claim, however, has to do with the Justice Department’s antitrust suit filed in 2020 against Google for monopolizing the search and advertising market.
In it, the DoJ states that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure should have required Google to stop its practice of auto-deleting chat histories as soon as it anticipated the coming litigation back in mid-2019. But Google did not, the government claims. Instead, Google employees continued to be able to turn their messaging app’s chat history from on to off anytime they saw fit.
It explains that the program Google uses, Google Hangouts, an instant messaging product, offers a feature for “off the record” chats, which are automatically deleted by the system after 24 hours. Google had even trained its employees how to use the feature to discuss sensitive topics instead of using email, the filing says.
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