Google spends 15 years creating culture of concealment: NYT

NEW YORK, Nov. 20 (Xinhua) -- U.S. search engine giant Google took 15 years to make deletion the default in its internal communications, creating an office culture that tried to minimize its own information, reported The New York Times (NYT) on Wednesday.

"Among its tools: using legal privilege as an all-purpose shield and imposing restraints on its own technology, all while continually warning that loose lips could sink even the most successful corporation," noted the report.

How Google developed this distrustful culture was pieced together from hundreds of documents and exhibits, as well as witness testimony, in three antitrust trials against the Silicon Valley company over the last year, according to the report.

"The exhibits and testimony showed that Google took numerous steps to keep a lid on internal communications," said the report. "It encouraged employees to put 'attorney-client privileged' on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded."

Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents. But Google exempted instant messaging from automatic legal holds. If workers were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn their chat history on. From the evidence in the trials, few did, it added.