Search engine giant Google adopted various strategies over 15 years to avoid legal scrutiny over antitrust issues, a New York Times report has claimed.

The company, which is facing antitrust lawsuits in the United States, reportedly told employees to destroy evidence of their text messages, avoid using certain words in internal communications that could later serve as legal evidence, and often copy lawyers as soon as possible.

HT cannot independently verify this information.

Alphabet-owned Google has used such strategies since 2008, when the company was under legal scrutiny over an advertising deal with then-rival Yahoo, according to the report.

The company’s boss is said to have sent a confidential memo warning employees that regulators may seize on words casually used or thoughtlessly written to each other. Employees were also asked to “think twice” before posting about “hot topics.”

Government regulations in the United States require companies that anticipate legal action to preserve their records. But Google’s technology for its internal communications has reportedly been tweaked to make deletion the default, leaving it up to individual employees facing legal action to decide whether to keep their chat history on.

In a 2011 internal memo, Google advised employees to avoid “metaphors involving war or sports, winning or losing” and to reject references to “markets”, “market share” or “dominance”. Phrases such as “putting products in the hands of new customers” were also asked to be avoided because regulators could interpret the term to accuse the company of denying consumers a “choice,” the NYT report added.

Several testimony in antitrust cases show that Google also took other steps to keep a tight lid on its internal communications.

According to the NYT report, Google employees were encouraged to mark documents “attorney-client privileged” and always add the company’s attorney to the list of recipients, even when a specific internal communication did not involve legal matters.

In the case of Google vs. Epic Games, a California district judge observed that the search giant “ingrained a systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence” and that it was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice,” the report said.

In another case involving the company’s advertising technology, a Virginia district judge noted that Google’s document retention policy was designed in such a way that “an awful lot of evidence is likely to have been destroyed.”

In a case brought by the US Department of Justice against Google’s dominance of search engines, a district court in Columbia reviewed documents the company withheld as privileged and concluded that it did not deserve to be considered privileged after all.

What did Google say?

The company in a statement said it took the obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents seriously. “We have been responding to inquiries and litigation for years, and we educate our employees about legal privilege,” it added.

Agnieszka McPeak, professor at Gonzaga University School of Law, said New York Times that Google’s internal practices created the illusion of fraud that the company tried so hard to hide.

“Google had a corporate policy from the top down: Don’t save anything that might make us look bad. And that makes Google look bad. If they have nothing to hide, people think, why are they behaving the way they are?, ” added McPeak.

The company’s lawyer testified in the Epic Games trial that on average a Google employee wrote 13 times more emails than an employee from other companies and changes were made to its policies to prevent things from getting “worse”.

In the Epic case, the company was accused of abusing attorney-client privilege simply to keep documents out of legal scrutiny. Google denied it was practiced to encourage a “culture of concealment” and claimed its employees were “unsure” of the meaning of certain words.

Google also argued that it did its best to provide the government with necessary documents and the Justice Department failed to establish that “deleted” conversations were crucial to proving its case. The department hit back, claiming it could not because the material had been “deleted”.

The NYT report notes that Google has allegedly changed its practices once again amid mounting legal scrutiny. The company has started saving everything, including chats, and employees during litigation cannot turn off their chat history.

The company’s employees responded to the news by forming a group on WhatsApp, Meta’s end-to-end encrypted messaging app!