In Play Store trial, Sundar Pichai acknowledges some 'sensitive' materials not retained
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged in federal court on Tuesday that he sometimes marked documents as «privileged» and never turned off a setting that caused internal chats to delete automatically after one day.
Pichai was in court in San Francisco to defend Alphabet's Google from a lawsuit by Epic Games that alleges its app store policies amount to an illegal monopoly and have caused consumers to pay artificially high prices.
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Jurors were shown an internal Google document reminding employees that «anything you write can become subject to review in legal discovery» as well as one of Pichai's chat histories where he requested that history be turned off, meaning messages would be erased.
«I supported all recommendations from our legal and compliance team,» Pichai said during roughly an hour of testimony led by Epic's lawyer. He largely stuck to one-word answers but was occasionally admonished by Epic Games' attorney for straying beyond simple answers.
Pichai, in examination by a Google attorney, denied he had ever tried to keep any document hidden from a lawsuit. He said he used the term «privileged» on documents to indicate «confidential» not necessarily subject to attorney-client privilege.
But he later acknowledged,
