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Google “systematically destroyed” instant message chats every 24 hours, violating federal rules to preserve potentially relevant communications for litigation, the Department of Justice alleged in a filing that became public on Thursday.

As a result of Google’s default to preserve chats for only 24 hours unless an employee opts to turn on history for the conversation, “for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours,” the department wrote in the filing.

According to the DOJ, Google should have adjusted its defaults in mid-2019 “when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation.” Instead, it relied on individual employees to decide when chats were potentially relevant to future litigation, the department said.

“Few, if any,” did, according to DOJ.

Meanwhile, investigators alleged, Google “falsely” told the government it had “‘put a legal hold in place’ that ‘suspends auto-deletion.'” The government added that “at every turn, Google reaffirmed that it was preserving and searching all potentially relevant written communications.”

The data deletion continued up until as recently as this month when the government indicated it would file a motion for sanctions and an evidentiary hearing, investigators allege. At that point, the DOJ said, Google committed to “permanently set to history on.”

A Google spokesperson said in a statement company officials “strongly refute the DOJ’s claims. Our teams have conscientiously worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation. In fact, we have produced over 4 million documents in this case alone, and millions more to regulators around the world.”

The alleged issue is one that previously came up in Epic Games’ antitrust litigation against Google.

Epic submitted exhibits in that case that seemed to show some Google employees believed chats were a safer place to conduct sensitive conversations. For example, one exhibit shows an employee comment on a document that says “Since it’s a sensitive topic, I prefer to discuss offline or over hangout,” referring to Google’s chat product.

The parties in that suit hashed out the issue in front of a federal judge in the Northern District of California this year in two evidentiary hearings.

At one of those hearings on Jan. 31, Judge James Donato indicated he would be open to a kind of adverse jury instruction, but one that would allow the jury to draw its own conclusions on what the deletion of messages means for the case.

An adverse jury instruction, in its most stringent form, would instruct a jury that it should assume that the relevant documents that were destroyed would have cast Google in a negative light, according to Eileen Scallen, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, an expert in evidence and civil procedure. A lesser remedy could be to instruct the jury to not hold it against the plaintiff for not having specific documents to back up its claims.

Donato telegraphed that he might issue an instruction that falls somewhere in between, stressing his language was subject to change. He said such an instruction may be something along the lines of telling the jury that if it finds Google didn’t adequately preserve some documents, it may conclude those documents were adverse to the company’s interests.

While it’s difficult to replace the value of documents that could have become important evidence, Scallen said an adverse jury instruction is considered “very damning.”

“The one person the jury respects in a courtroom is the trial judge,” Scallen said in a phone interview late last month regarding the Epic case. “And if the trial judge is telling them you can presume that this was bad news for Google, they’re going to take that to heart.”

The DOJ alleged that even after Epic confronted Google about the chat-deletion concerns in that case, the tech giant still withheld its deletion policy from the federal government “and continued to destroy written communications in this case.”

The practices denied the federal prosecutors the chance to view “candid discussions between Google’s executives, including likely trial witnesses,” the government claimed.

The Justice Department is asking that the court hold that Google violated a federal rule of civil procedure by destroying the chats, order a hearing to figure out how to sanction the company and remedy the alleged destruction of evidence and order it to provide more information about its chat practices.

Scallen said that if Google “didn’t give clear directions to retain” relevant chats “this notion that they left it to the individuals, that’s just not responsible.”

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WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning says censorship is still ‘a dominant threat’

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WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning says censorship is still 'a dominant threat'

Chelsea Manning: Censorship still a dominant threat

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning says censorship is still “a dominant threat,” advocating for a more decentralized internet to help better protect individuals online.

Her comments come amid ongoing tension linked to online safety rules, with some tech executives recently seeking to push back over content moderation concerns.

Speaking to CNBC’s Karen Tso at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday, Manning said that one way to ensure online privacy could be “decentralized identification,” which gives individuals the ability to control their own data.

“Censorship is a dominant threat. I think that it is a question of who’s doing the censoring, and what the purpose is — and also censorship in the 21st century is more about whether or not you’re boosted through like an algorithm, and how the fine-tuning of that seems to work,” Manning said.

“I think that social media and the monopolies of social media have sort of gotten us used to the fact that certain things that drive engagement will be attractive,” she added.

“One of the ways that we can sort of countervail that is to go back to the more decentralized and distribute the internet of the early ’90s, but make that available to more people.”

Nym Technologies Chief Security Officer Chelsea Manning at a press conference held with Nym Technologies CEO Harry Halpin in the Media Village to present NymVPN during the second day of Web Summit on November 13, 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal. 

Horacio Villalobos | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Asked how tech companies could make money in such a scenario, Manning said there would have to be “a better social contract” put in place to determine how information is shared and accessed.

“One of the things about distributed or decentralized identification is that through encryption you’re able to sort of check the box yourself, instead of having to depend on the company to provide you with a check box or an accept here, you’re making that decision from a technical perspective,” Manning said.

‘No longer secrecy versus transparency’

Manning, who works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a company that specializes in online privacy and security, was convicted of espionage and other charges at a court-martial in 2013 for leaking a trove of secret military files to online media publisher WikiLeaks.

She was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was later released in 2017, when former U.S. President Barack Obama commuted her sentence.

Asked to what extent the environment has changed for whistleblowers today, Manning said, “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere. We have more information than ever.”

She added, “Countries and governments no longer seem to invest the same amount of time and effort in hiding information and keeping secrets. What countries seem to be doing now is they seem to be spending more time and energy spreading misinformation and disinformation.”

Manning said the challenge for whistleblowers now is to sort through the information to understand what is verifiable and authentic.

“It’s no longer secrecy versus transparency,” she added.

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SoftBank-backed fintech Zopa aims to double profit this year as it eyes 2025 current account launch

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SoftBank-backed fintech Zopa aims to double profit this year as it eyes 2025 current account launch

Jaidev Janardana, CEO of U.K. digital bank Zopa.

Zopa

LISBON, Portugal — British online lender Zopa is on track to double profits and increase annual revenue by more than a third this year amid bumper demand for its banking services, the company’s CEO told CNBC.

Zopa posted revenues of £222 million ($281.7 million) in 2023 and is expecting to cross the £300 million revenue milestone this year — that would mark a 35% annual jump.

The 2024 estimates are based on unaudited internal figures.

The firm also says it is on track to increase pre-tax profits twofold in 2024, after hitting £15.8 million last year.

Zopa, a regulated bank that is backed by Japanese giant SoftBank, has plans to venture into the world of current accounts next year as it looks to focus more on new products.

The company currently offers credit cards, personal loans and savings accounts that it offers through a mobile app — similar to other digital banks such as Monzo and Revolut which don’t operate physical branches.

“The business is doing really well. In 2024, we’ve hit or exceeded the plans across all metrics,” CEO Jaidev Janardana told CNBC in an interview Wednesday.

He said the strong performance is coming off the back of gradually improving sentiment in the U.K. economy, where Zopa operates exclusively.

Commenting on Britain’s macroeconomic conditions, Janardana said, “While it has been a rough few years, in terms of consumers, they have continued to feel the pain slightly less this year than last year.”

The market is “still tight,” he noted, adding that fintech offerings such as Zopa’s — which typically provide higher savings rates than high-street banks — become “more important” during such times.

“The proposition has become more relevant, and while it’s tight for customers, we have had to be much more constrained in terms of who we can lend to,” he said, adding that Zopa has still been able to grow despite that.

A big priority for the business going forward is product, Janardana said. The firm is developing a current account product which would allow users to spend and manage their money more easily, in a similar fashion to mainstream banking providers like HSBC and Barclays, as well as fintech upstarts such as Monzo.

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“We believe that there is more that the consumer can have in the current account space,” Janardana said. “We expect that we will launch our current account with the general public sometime next year.”

Janardana said consumers can expect a “slick” experience from Zopa’s current account offering, including the ability to view and manage multiple account bank accounts from one interface and access to competitive savings rates.

IPO ‘not top of mind’

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It’s ‘liquidity, stupid’: VCs say tech investing is tough amid IPO lull and ‘nuts’ AI hype

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It's 'liquidity, stupid': VCs say tech investing is tough amid IPO lull and 'nuts' AI hype

Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, and Larry Aschebrook, founder and managing partner of G Squared, speak during a CNBC-moderated panel at Web Summit 2024 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Rita Franca | Nurphoto | Getty Images

LISBON, Portugal — It’s a tough time for the venture capital industry right now as a dearth of blockbuster initial public offerings and M&A activity has sucked liquidity from the market, while buzzy artificial intelligence startups dominate attention.

At the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, two venture investors — whose portfolios include the likes of multibillion-dollar AI startups Databricks Anthropic and Groq — said things have become much more difficult as they’re unable to cash out of some of their long-term bets.

“In the U.S., when you talk about the presidential election, it’s the economy stupid. And in the VC world, it’s really all about liquidity stupid,” Edith Yeung, general partner at Race Capital, an early-stage VC firm based in Silicon Valley, said in a CNBC-moderated panel earlier this week.

Liquidity is the holy grail for VCs, startup founders and early employees as it gives them a chance to realize gains — or, if things turn south, losses — on their investments.

When a VC makes an equity investment and the value of their stake increases, it’s only a gain on paper. But when a startup IPOs or sells to another company, their equity stake gets converted into hard cash — enabling them to make new investments.

Yeung said the lack of IPOs over the last couple of years had created a “really tough” environment for venture capital.

At the same, however, there’s been a rush from investors to get into buzzy AI firms.

“What’s really crazy is in the last few years, OpenAI’s domination has really been determined by Big Techs, the Microsofts of the world,” said Yeung, referring to ChatGPT-creator OpenAI’s seismic $157 billion valuation. OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, which has made a multibillion-dollar investment in the firm.

‘The IPO market is not happening’

Larry Aschebrook, founder and managing partner at late-stage VC firm G Squared, agreed that the hunt for liquidity is getting harder — even though the likes of OpenAI are seeing blockbuster funding rounds, which he called “a bit nuts.”

“You have funds and founders and employees searching for liquidity because the IPO market is not happening. And then you have funding rounds taking place of generational types of businesses,” Aschebrook said on the panel.

As important as these deals are, Aschebrook suggested they aren’t helping investors because even more money is getting tied up in illiquid, privately owned shares. G Squared itself an early backer of Anthropic, a foundational AI model startup competing with Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Using a cooking analogy, Aschebrook suggested that venture capitalists are being starved of lucrative share sales which would lead to them realizing returns. “If you want to cook some dinner, you better sell some stock, ” he added.

Looking for opportunities beyond OpenAI

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