In other words, Google had better be ready to receive the mother of all sanctions motions (possibly sua sponte).
“I am going to get to the bottom of who is responsible,” he said, adding he would pursue these issues “on my own, outside of this trial.”
What's that if not an investigation?
I guess you could call that an “investigation,” although it feels weird to me. By “on my own,” he has to be referring to sanctions power. He has no authority to just go a-sleuthing. “Outside of this trial” means he’s not going to disrupt trial proceedings with an order to show cause, even though he could, because some of the sanctions available to him include things that would immediately impact this trial (from a mandatory inference jury instruction up to default judgment).
He's stated that, by default, it's disabled. Is it also now disabled for people who have modified the setting prior to this, and have any policies regarding auto-deleting messages been put into place ...?
That’s the case now, it wasn’t the case at the end of 2022 iirc, back when the investigation started. It was “history off” (aka “autodelete on”) by default for all 1:1 chats.
I had to manually turn on history for every single chat i was starting with a person i haven’t messaged before.