By Richard Lawler , a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years

FTC says Amazon executives destroyed potential evidence by using apps like Signal

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2024-04-27 04:00:03

By Richard Lawler , a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.

FTC lawyers submitted a filing on Thursday that claims Amazon’s top execs used Signal’s disappearing messages feature to destroy evidence relevant to the agency’s massive antitrust lawsuit. (You remember the one? The FTC accused Amazon of creating a secret “Project Nessie” pricing algorithm that may have generated more than $1 billion in extra profits.)

Now, The Washington Post (which is owned by Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos) reports that Amazon is just one of several companies recently accused of turning to encrypted messaging apps like Signal that can permanently erase messages automatically.

You may recall the government making similar arguments about Sam Bankman-Fried’s use of Signal during his trial for fraud and how that verdict eventually shook out. Deleted chats were also a sticking point for at least one juror in Google’s recent courtroom loss to Epic Games and came up in the DOJ’s antitrust trial against Google.