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Ask HN: Who, if anyone, owns the chat conversations?
This is mostly about digital ethics.
I'm working on a service that allows users to make their own copy of chat conversations (from Slack, Telegram, HipChat, etc.) The conversations are those which the users are participating in and have a rightful access to.
However, sometimes when users do use the service, and their team admins become aware of that fact, the admins treat such a copying as a "situation", as a full-fledged data breach, and trying to mitigate "the problem". Though what is being archived is exactly the same data that the user can see via chat's native clients. All this looks like those DRMs when you can read the book on your PC, but can't copy a quote: look, but don't touch. And I'm surely not happy with my service being treated as some shady hacker's tool.
Do the users have some kind of moral right to download their conversations, especially if those conversations are going to disappear otherwise? To what extent? As there are other people' messages in the talks, making them public is obviously not the best idea.
- andreicon 10y agoDunno about Slack, Telegram, etc but we could take Facebook as an example: Sharing Your Content and Information You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook from https://www.facebook.com/terms https://www.facebook.com/terms
- jtfairbank 10y agoAbsolutely. Especially since this is a service. Sure, employees could copy the chat locally, but by using this service they end up sending the data offsite. Certainly sounds like a security breach to me.
- vsiden 10y agoI agree that this _is_ a security breach if there's a legal agreement (a contract or TOS), and in this case this is certainly not a question of ethics. But in my case, this is happening with informal communities. And btw, in case of Slack and HipChat, the data isn't "on-site" to begin with: it's already on someone else's server :) Also I want to point out that there's reason why users want to have their own copy of the conversation history. Most admins don't care about preserving history, especially if this means any hassle. Slack, for example, keeps just 10K recent messages for free teams, and having full history requires paying for Slack. If they can't pay or won't pay, the users are out in the cold. What else can the poor sods do?
- kohanz 10y agoIANAL, but when you say "team admins", do you mean their teams in the workplace? If so, then I would assume that it is all property of the company, in the same vein that work e-mails, documents, and source code generally is. I imagine it is mentioned in the small-print of their employment contract or IP agreement. If the conversations are being had during working hours, with company tools, then wouldn't the company "own" those conversations?
- vsiden 10y agoI can see your point in cases where there _is_ a contract or an IP agreement or a TOS. How about less formal teams like open source communities, online courses, clubs, etc.? There is no employers who legally owns the conversations, just an admin who usurped rights to control them. Case in point: many online courses use team chat services like Slack for informal communication and socializing between students, to act as virtual campuses. One wouldn't expect private conversations between students to be moderated by the faculty. :)
- tmail21 10y agoIn general there are two approaches to data ownership in these types of services, viz. User-owned (and typically mutable by owner) and Jointly-owned (and typically immutable). Slack, Google Docs etc. follow the user-owned approach. For example in a Slack conversation I can modify or delete my messages but cannot modify or delete someone else's messages. This has some interesting implications, viz. that a conversation is never quite 'done' as it can always be modified/partially deleted at a later point. So, the question becomes what exactly is one archiving. The best one can say is that one is archiving at a snapshot in time. For example consider: Joe: Go ahead and Place the Order Bob: I placed the Order. It's Order #456 Later Joe modifies his message 'Don't place the Order'. What is the implication of archiving this? Is Bob now in trouble? As you can see it is fraught with issues. The other approach is that the data is 'jointly owned' (and immutable). For example with TMail21 (https://tmail21.com https://tmail21.com) , the data is technically and legally owned by all parties in the conversation. All changes are append-only (i.e. the past is immutable). And so, in this case there are no legal, moral or semantic hazards in archiving. Net, net, there are not just 'moral' issues in archiving user-owned type conversations but also technical and semantic issues as well.