If "keep the data" means "keep exsiting data" then disabling logging for new conversations seems ok.
> the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law."
This is too arbitrary. It is like saying that everyone who uses secret chats and auto-deleted photos in Telegram is a criminal trying to hide the evidence.
> If "keep the data" means "keep exsiting data" then disabling logging for new conversations seems ok.
Google has two modes of conversation history retention. The first, the default, is "delete after 24h". The second, which is opt-in only, and apparently extremely rarely used, is "delete after 30d".
Google attempted to be too tricky for the court. They decided that when place on legal hold, they'd continue to retain the opt-in messages only, and continue to delete the 24h retention messages, which is not what they were told to do.
And then, because they thought they could get away with it, on dozens of occasions they told the DOJ and the courts that they were holding and retaining all message history...
