Home » L.A. officials stop use of disappearing Google Chats, citing Palisades fire – Jobsmaa.com

L.A. officials stop use of disappearing Google Chats, citing Palisades fire – Jobsmaa.com

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For years, Los Angeles city employees could communicate via Google Chat messages Automatically deleted after 24 hours.

The city-sanctioned practice was discovered last year by a community group and after good government experts questioned whether it violated public records laws, city officials refused to block it.

This week, after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other communities, the city abruptly changed course. All one-to-one and group Google Chat messages are now saved.

The city's information technology agency announced the news in an email to employees on Tuesday. “In response to user requests related to a citywide emergency, the city enabled Google Chat History,” the email said, referring to the wildfire.

Those messages are now “subject to legal proceedings, public records requests and the preparation of internal investigations,” the email noted.

Ted Ross, general manager of the technology agency, confirmed in an email to the Times that Google Chat messages will be stored “indefinitely.” He said protecting messages would help employees look back on online conversations they had during fires.

“This will be a useful feature for Los Angeles city employees who use Google Workspace to assist with emergency response operations as they can review previous messages in a threaded discussion,” Ross said.

A community group, the Crane Boulevard Safety Coalition, challenged the city's use of the disappearing messages. Representatives of the coalition welcomed the decision, but accused city officials of setting it on fire in an attempt to escape responsibility for years of improperly destroying public records.

The coalition, which sued the city in 2023 over its approval of a single-family home in Mount Washington, first found out about the missing messages during the case's discovery process.

Jamie D. Hall, an attorney representing the coalition, accused the city of being disingenuous in linking the change to the wildfires instead of the lawsuit.

“They don't want to take responsibility,” he said. “They want to say that something else triggered this, and they don't have to admit that what they're doing is wrong.”

“Many city employees work long hours responding to emergencies, and the ability to store chats for more than 24 hours is helpful,” said Ross, head of the IT agency. He said he was not aware of the Crane Boulevard Preservation Coalition case.

Critics have argued that the automatically disappearing messages allow officials to violate the California Public Records Act, which establishes the public's right to access government business and city-owned records. Document retention policies.

City officials did not explain how the disappearing chat feature complies with state public records law or city policies, which require most records to be preserved for at least two years.

Google Chat is available to about 26,000 city employees and has been used in some form since the early 2010s. City officials agreed last month Employees have long had the ability to communicate internally and externally with disappearing messages.

In November, the Crane Boulevard Defense Coalition threatened to file additional lawsuits over the news.

The agreement between the coalition and the city, signed by a judge last month, said the city attorney's office would “immediately conduct an internal investigation into the city's record-keeping and related policies.”

City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto's office did not respond to requests for comment on the status of the investigation and whether the activation of Google's chat history is related to the Crane Boulevard Preservation Coalition's legal action.

Hall, the coalition's attorney, said the city should formalize a new policy for retaining Google Chat messages. Otherwise, it might turn off chat history again in the future, he said.

Jamie York, a member of the good government group Unrig LA, said the city should never have used the disappearance reports.

“Transparency is critical to responsible government,” he said. “I think the city is unfortunately motivated to follow the law when it's threatened with a lawsuit.”

Times staff writer Julia Vick contributed to this report.

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