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Google Seeks 'Do-No-Discoverable-Evil' Patent
theodp writes "E-mails and other communications between employees,' explains Google in a newly-published patent application for its Policy Violation Checker invention, 'can implicate potential violations of company policy or local, state or federal law that can go unchecked by attorneys or other legal personnel.' So how can you avoid those embarrassing Goldman Sachs and Enron e-mail gaffes? Use Google's 'methods and systems for identifying problematic phrases in an electronic document'! From the patent application: 'Documents may be used as evidence in court, administrative, or other proceedings. It is in a company's best interest to minimize or eliminate policy violations and/or situations that could give rise to legal liability. It is also often in a company's best interest to be able to Pack [?] these situations. Problematic phrases include, but are not limited to, phrases that present policy violations, have legal implications, or are otherwise troublesome to a company, business, or individual.' So, if you can't Do-No-Evil, at least you can Do-No-Discoverable-Evil!"
Clippy: Do you want to really say that and be sued?
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It's the same as what happens when there is "open" government. As soom as there are laws and guidelines that governmental and departmental emails must be available for public perusal, suddenly all of the email channels are just filled with happy fluff and declarations of meeting times only and perhaps some birthday greetings. All matters of substance suddenly are done only by direct telephone contact or person-to-person meetings with no notes taken that could be used as evidence or found in discovery. Notice how few top level politicians directly use email, or if they do they tend to use private accounts to conduct gov't business even if that's technically and legally a no-no.
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So google is making a tool to warn people as they type that what they type could be "construed" as a bad statement. It's like Clippy popping up to tell you in a big brother voice "It's looks like you're making a sexually harassing statement or a statement that could put the company at fault. Do you really want to say that?"
I'm not really sure that this is even something they can patent? Isn't their prior art?
I seem to recall that the various companies (like banks) have programs in place that do stuff like automatically redact and prohibit things like emailing a document that contains a social security number. Using the above example of SSNs, I seem to recall that it would redact SSNs by changing 000-00-0000 to ***-**-**** or the likes?
I didn't read the patent application but examining emails and other documents for risky content that increase liability seems to have been long-since done and fairly run-of-the-mill considering that it is already in use and has been for some time.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
This sort of things already long gone. My company archives all email after 90days and deletes it after 1 year. Then they gave us a "chat client" for the majority of the company and an internal IRC channel for the IS department. So naturally everyone moved to those instead of email. Saving emails locally is punishable by termination and they have scripts that actively search for emails, archives and PST files and delete them.
My guess is, a lot of companies are doing this, and it's bad for Googles business model. So if they can get legal departments to trust that long term email storage isn't just a huge, decades long archive of casual conversations that can be subpenaed, taken out of context and generally used to sink any future case they may have to fight, then maybe they can get business to start using it again. The big problem with email is that courts have seemed to taken it as official correspondence or official policy if it's in an email rather than the casual conversation that it really is. Just because some bottom level manager says X policy is designed to rip people off does not mean that manager has any clue what they're talking about. Yes there are bad companies out there, but there are plenty of decent companies that have gotten caught up in huge legal battles over emails that certainly weren't nearly as big a deal as they were made out to be in court.
Using the above example of SSNs, I seem to recall that it would redact SSNs by changing 000-00-0000 to ***-**-**** or the likes?
Interestingly, this same thing works on Slashdot for your password. If you accidentally write your password to a comment, Slashcode will hide it.
My password is ******. See?
That's a good point you make. Google needs to keep people using email so that google can keep harvesting information out of the email contents, thus it's in google's best interest to keep email looking like a safe venue for communication. I had not thought of that particular aspect. I know that my mom is very circumspect about putting any health related things into email, even though her hospital is pushing her to use email to communicate with patients. She only wants to use it for confirming appointment times and changing appt times to ensure that she doesn't accidentally leak any HIPAA covered private patient health information.
That's the idea of this patent. The system will let you know if what you wrote in an email about shady dealings will be incriminating, so you can re-word it.
It's a lawyer in a box helping you facilitate shady actions with minimal discoverable evidence.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Equally, it can be used to not do it; how it is used depends on the users intent, it isn't inherent in the patented method. (Although "violations of company policy", called out in the patent as well as violations of the law, are most interesting for users who are trying to control what is done to align with policy and less useful -- actively harmful to the company, in fact -- if individual email users use it for concealment.)
Certainly, I know in many jobs I've had there would have been less cleanup for other people to do if staff that were innocently ignorant of details of company policy and/or controlling law had something reading their email that caught potential problems and pointed them in the right direction before they sent out emails to customers, contractors, etc.
I think the key new thing that most people are missing is the first phrase after "comprising" in claim 1: "detecting a context of the electronic document", and the fact that pretty much everything in the patent (including the identification of whether particular phrases are problematic) depends on the detected context. Its not simple blind phrase checking.
The patent system is patently rotten independently of that, but most of the arguments being used to dismiss the novelty of this invention in this thread appear to be missing the key point in the method.
That's the idea of this patent. The system will let you know if what you wrote in an email about shady dealings will be incriminating, so you can re-word it.
It's a lawyer in a box helping you facilitate shady actions with minimal discoverable evidence.
Bullshit.
Go read the article instead of the hopelessly biased summary.
This is more about not letting casual joking references slip into official communication due to fact that future readers will not be privy the the reference and will substitute their own prejudiced interpretation, much like you have done above.
Its easy to use every day office language in an email and have it horribly miss interpreted by people unfamiliar with the jargon or the context.
I was once called on the carpet for saying in an email to one of my programmers something like "Mrs Jones has reported extraneous characters appearing on the end the report lines, so be sure you clear out the buffer when you next look at her programs." Mrs Jones saw this and complained up the chain that I was making derogatory remarks about her prodigious girth.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The system will let you know if what you wrote in an email about shady dealings will be incriminating, so you can re-word it.
Google Clippy: "You seem to be writing a criminal conspiracy proposal. Can I help you with the wording?"
Ezekiel 23:20