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Guide to Slack import and export tools
- larrik 9y agoPreviously, you could only see employee DMs if you turned on Compliance Exports, at which point you could download all of them going forward. Now it sounds like everything you've ever written could be downloaded at any time without notice. So, all of those communications you had with co-workers based on the promise they would be private until you were notified future ones wouldn't be anymore? Now it's ALL available to your employer. Surprise! (This is presumably due to GDPR)
- mindcrime 9y agoMeh. Nobody should be surprised by any of this in the slightest. If your employer provides / pays for any kind of communications tool, the only sane position is to assume that they can - and probably do - monitor every single byte you send.
- asimpletune 9y agoYup
- nerdponx 9y agoExactly. I'm surprised they couldn't before.
- domevent 9y agoThe smart people will have anticipated this, and their message logs will paint them as good for the company.
- freehunter 9y agoHonestly I didn't realize my Slack DMs on my work account weren't private until I saw this. I assumed that since my employer pays for the account, any message I sent was being monitored.
- truetraveller 9y agoyou meant "were" instead of "weren't"
- freehunter 9y agoCorrect.
- ajross 9y agoThat's what I'm thinking. I mean... of course employers expect to be able to have access to communication done by employees in the course of doing their jobs. They've been able to do this with every (archivable) communication medium since the invention of writing. Where is the news here? If you want privacy use a private channel. Your employer's work tools don't qualify.
- fragmede 9y agoBy private channel, I assume you mean a completely separate system that is not slack, and not a private slack channel (which, prior to this, was private from slack workspace admins, with hilarious results).
- QasimK 9y agoI think the EU would have something to say about that: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/05/landmark-eu-ruling-heralds-end-snooping-bosses-spying-workers/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/05/landmark-eu-ruli...
- joshenglish 9y agoSeems a little different. Courts ruled that work emails could be viewed, just not personal accounts used on work computers.
- mindcrime 9y agoAdditionally, unless your work environment is sophisticated enough to fiddle with the certificates on your machine, and run a MITM proxy, you should be safe using something like GMail over https. Now I'm sure some companies do manage to intercept outgoing https traffic, but I doubt that most companies do. OTOH, I still think being paranoid is the safest policy, so if you're plotting to overthrow your boss, or sell secrets to your biggest competitor, I still wouldn't do it on the company networking, and/or using a company computer.
- zdragnar 9y agoIf your Gmail account is through work (i.e. not a personal one) they already have access to it.
- mindcrime 9y agoAgreed. I was referring to the parent post's comment about using personal accounts at work. That might be safe, to some extent. But again, I would lean on the side of paranoia if you're talking about anything that could get you (fired|put in jail).
- Piskvorrr 9y agoIn any case, if you would plan any of that, I would guess that it would most probably leak out through entirely nontechnological channel - e.g. by somebody overhearing in person, or even by a co-conspirator defecting for their own gain. Cloak-and-dagger games are very similar to building your own crypto: likely to be broken at a fundamental level, never mind the amount of magic security glitter that you pile on top.
- froindt 9y agoI think there's some middle ground, some grey area where whether it's alright is murky. It's kind of pulling the rug out from under people when the policy of a 3rd party provider abruptly changes and suddenly tons of messages become available to the company. There are a number of things I might mention to a coworker over a private IM which wouldn't necessarily put my employment at risk, but would be awkward for management to suddenly have access to. A couple made up examples: "I'm super sick, but $boss is really pushing me to get the report out. I just want to go home and be sick all alone." "I hate management's decision to reduce vacation days. No wonder we can't keep people around here." "Did you see Tom's email? It's kinda awkward that he thinks he's a strong contributor to the group..."
- Null-Set 9y agoAs a company policy I sure hope your IT doesn't make emails available to your management.
- froindt 9y agoNo they don't, but I work at a large megacorp. At a small 10-20 person non-technology company startup, the admin on Slack is likely to be the owner or general manager. It could be another 5-10 people before a person is hired on as full-time IT.
- stedaniels 9y agoIf the owner or GM has enough time to dip into Slack DM's, or even emails, the company has bigger issues.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoAll of those conversations should take place out of band of employer communications tools. Never write something you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of a newspaper.
- daveFNbuck 9y agoThese are all the sorts of things that you would ideally want management to know about so they can make better informed decisions. Assuming of course that you have competent and trustworthy managers.
- joshenglish 9y agoThis is not completely true. Been able to pull DMs via the Discovery API.
- larrik 9y agoI actually didn't know this. Why did they have the big alert when turning on the Compliance Exports then?
- joshenglish 9y agoWanted to let people know about GDPR. More for optics I am sure.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agowhy presumably due to GDPR? I would think it was a possible GDPR problem for them in the future. Specifically, you wrote it based on expectation it was private and now it is not, when did you give permission for sharing that data?
- larrik 9y agoGDPR was mentioned in the announcement email (though not for this line item).
- freehunter 9y agoIf it's your company's asset, you gave permission for sharing that data when you signed the e-handbook at orientation, the same document that gives them the right to monitor your work emails, put MDM on your work-issued phone, and log your work machine's network traffic into their SIEM. You have no right to privacy when you're inside your company's office using your company's computers to access your company's network. They own it all, you just have permission to use it within the guidelines they set and you signed off on when you were hired.
- icebraining 9y agoYou seem to be applying US legal concepts, when the question was about the GDPR, an EU directive.
- timblair 9y agoAn employee's use of a company-provided communication channel like Slack isn't covered by GDPR, but the company is liable for the content that's stored in their Slack account. Under GDPR, I, as a customer of Company X, have a right to know about and request a copy of any data stored about me by that company, which includes Slack conversations, in both open and "private" channels. GDPR also applies retroactively, so the old compliance export process wouldn't cover it.
- whyever 9y agoYou should not assume your communications are private if there is no end-to-end encryption. Also, the employers are often required to do this because of regulations. (I think those are silly regulations given that end-to-end encryption is so easily available nowadays, but the companies don't really have a choice here.)
- larrik 9y agoAh, I work remotely, so I normally don't worry about that sort of thing.
- caymanjim 9y agoYou shouldn't assume they're private just because they're encrypted. Employers can and will install SSL certs on your desktop machine so that they can decrypt and scan/archive everything at the gateway. This is standard practice in financial companies, and is easily done anywhere. They can also install screen capture and key logging software if they want, but that's less common and without disclosure is a lot shadier (although certainly legal in the US). I wouldn't expect it most places; it's a more extreme step. But never trust encryption at work unless you know your company's policies.
- gburt 9y ago`whyever` said _end-to-end_ encrypted, presumably meaning "between the intended recipient and I," not "between a middleman and I." Of course, you also need to trust your hardware.
- bigtunacan 9y agoThis is to be expected from Big Brother. These days one should assume the telescreen is always watching and so should be very cautious as to not commit a thoughtcrime. ---- Edit ---- To clarify; my comment is referring to the novel 1984. While a bit tongue in cheek, it was not meant entirely as a joke. This is a forum visited mostly by IT workers. I would assume most of us here know enough (or should know enough) to realize that any of our communications at work can be read by someone else and so you may want to treat it a bit as such. In my personal programming working experience I have seen data captured in all of the following forms, reviewed, and then used to fire or prevent firing individuals. Email, Instant messaging, Phone calls (audio recordings), Computer monitor (video recordings)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gumby 9y agoI doubt this has anything to do with GDPR which is about personal information of customers and users. In this case the customer is the company and I don't think GDPR applies.
- larrik 9y agoThe announcement email says "As part of our growth and in support of upcoming changes to EU data protection law, we’re launching new tools and features and updating our Privacy Policy and User Terms."
- CaptainZapp 9y ago"As part of our growth and in support of upcoming changes to EU data protection law, we’re launching new tools and features and updating our Privacy Policy and User Terms." That sounds like a convenient marketing bullshit bogey man to me.
- snowwolf 9y agoActually GDPR also applies to your personal information that a company holds about you as an employee. However GDPR doesn’t apply if there are other laws that also apply to the data, which will be the case in a lot of circumstances for employees.
- EpicEng 9y agoThen your mistake was having conversations you wouldn't like your boss to read using your company's internal messaging system. How is this any different than e.g. emails?
- wglb 9y agoIt also could be other compliance requirements.
- mnm1 9y agoWhy would you have such conversations or expectations when using company chat? That's unprofessional and, frankly, stupid because it puts one's job in danger (as could an in person conversion heard by the wrong people at work). If you want to talk in private, there's dozens of other chat programs out there you can run on your own devices.
- bbarn 9y agoYou're missing the point. Slack was one of those programs until this retroactive privacy policy change.
- mnm1 9y agoYou really thought Slack somehow didn't have access to those messages or deleted them? That this feature wouldn't be inevitable? Their whole sales spiel is that they can keep all your messages forever. This shouldn't be surprising. I'm not missing the point at all. I always assumed they had an entire history and could reveal it at any time. It's not end to end encrypted. Assuming otherwise is dangerous and frankly, idiotic in today's world.
- nedt 9y agoFollowing GDPR could be much easier. Simply delete messages ASAP. Best protection of private data is not storing them.
- astro_robot 9y agoDo employers have the same tools with email?
- joshenglish 9y agoYes. You can access Outlook365 and Exchange via APIs as well as Google Apps for Business. Plus Calendars, etc. Anything that uses LDAP locally and now through the 365 APIs.
- mistermann 9y agoHow does it work, an outlook 365 admin(?) Can read anyone's email that they want? Do they essentially just log onto the normal Hi as that user?
- madeofpalk 9y agoYes.
- joshenglish 9y agoIt depends on the setup. There are different nuances but through an Admin granted API key you could potentially access all emails. There are safeguards that companies put in place to restrict this as well.
- softawre 9y agoAs a manager, if I fire somebody or they leave, I get access to their mailbox via Outlook365 for like 3 months, just in case I need to grab something from it. So there must be a way to assign ownership of a mailbox to another user.
- Inverte 9y agoYeah, you can attach mailboxes to other users with Powershell. You could also just create a mail rule that sends a copy of every email everytime someone sends and receives one and they wouldn't know.
- kerkeslager 9y agoThis should not be surprising to anyone. You're giving your data to a corporation who has every incentive to give it to your employer. The only real surprise here is that they weren't doing this earlier.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoThat's backwards. You're working for an employer who has every responsibility to monitor business communication. Slack can't "give" something they were never supposed to control in the first place and only have by accident of architecture. This fixes an old bug.
- kerkeslager 9y ago> You're working for an employer who has every responsibility to monitor business communication. Setting aside for a second the unusual ethics being proposed here: it's trivial to bypass official channels if you want to say something you don't want your employer to see. It's fairly standard practice to not put anything you don't want someone else to read in text at all, but rather to pick up the phone--it's too easy for someone to copy/paste a Slack message or Forward an email. This can't be a responsibility of employers because very few employers can live up to that responsibility.
- taylorcooney 9y agoSlack...the big brother you never asked for!
- tvanantwerp 9y agoAs head of IT for a company using Slack: FINALLY. Don't get me wrong--it's not like I want to read your messages and very likely won't. But there are times when I have no choice. A few years back, a group of interns started privately harassing other interns via Slack. Only way to see it was to boot an offending intern from his work station and go into his Slack to see what was happening. We had to make all intern accounts into multi-channel guests after that. Compare that to our email, where I can go into anyone's messages immediately if need-be. This is all very standard corporate IT stuff that you need for HR and legal reasons. Edit: I'll say this is still not an ideal solution. I don't go into private communications unless I have to, and I'd rather have the option to review specific DMs / private channels than dump everything. I really don't want everything; that's more than I care to see. Also, to clarify, I'm in the US and our employees are well aware that communications on company-operated platforms should not be considered private. I want them to be careful how they communicate in writing, not because they should be worried about me, but because they should be worried about Slack getting hacked/leaked. With the recent Facebook news, I should have thought that sort of concern was obvious.
- fjsolwmv 9y agoWhy can't the recipient save a copy of logs?
- sliken 9y agoBecause they typically can be easily falsified.
- antris 9y agoYou could have the logs signed with Slack's PGP key so they cannot be altered without the signature causing a mismatch.
- IncRnd 9y agoThere are security issues here that you may not be aware. For one example, if technically knowledgeable people want to falsify signed logs without having the signing key, they can simply keep a separate set of logs with actual innocuous conversations. Slack would sign those in your scenario without a problem. This is the canonical problem of keeping "double-books".
- DanBlake 9y agoTechnically this was possible before this. Since the email to each slack user is an @company.com address all you need to do is take control of the employees email address, reset the slack password and login as the target user.
- reustle 9y ago> Since the email to each slack user is an @company.com address Not necessarily
- gburt 9y agoIt turns out administrators could change the email address anyway. :)
- vuln 9y agoRight?
- heedlessly2 9y agofor most companies slack channel, you would need the @company.com to get approved for slack access. Very rare and unprofessional to allow someone's personal email access
- dugluak 9y agowith or without my consent?
- darkstar999 9y agoWithout.
- dugluak 9y agohow is it legal. Even the law enforcement needs to provide a warrant in case they want to search my apartment.
- DuskStar 9y agoThey aren't searching your apartment. They're searching the office you use in their building.
- simonswords82 9y agoBecause the company you work for owns and pays for the platform you're using. Just like they presumably own the computer you use, and any other platforms/equipment supplied so you can do your job.
- EpicEng 9y agoNot if you're living in one of their cells. Your employer pays for slack and it is a work related tool, just like your emails. If you want to have private communications then send a text. BTW they can also search your desk because, you know, it's not yours.
- dugluak 9y agowhat about, lets say, conversations in the company owned cafeteria? can the employer record them without your consent and use as evidence against you?
- 9y ago
- decebalus1 9y agoI was always under the impression this was already going on. I don't see the surprise here: there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy with regards to conversations between employees happening on company virtual grounds. Heck, in my previous company when we wanted to talk about something off-the-record, we'd even physically go off campus due to the sheer amount of walls equipped with 'ears'.
- Piskvorrr 9y agoNever mind the walls: what about the people equipped with literal ears?
- duxup 9y agoI think if the employer provides the tool, it is their data. I know there are different traditions in other places where they consider something like work email to be more of an employee owned or privacy issues. I always thought that was a bit wonky and it is easier to identify who owns what by ... who owns it.
- IAmEveryone 9y agoI may agree with result regarding Slack. But your argument doesn’t really work if you consider who owns a rented apartment, leased car, or company phone officially allowed to be used for personal matters.
- duxup 9y agoMy statement isn't meant to be a rule for all things in life, the difference between an apartment and Slack are kinda huge.
- dugluak 9y agowhat if your cafeteria conversation is recorded on a camera without your consent and used as an evidence against you? is it legal or invasion of privacy?
- softawre 9y agoDid you have the expectation of privacy (probably not). These are not new issues and there is existing law around them.
- golergka 9y agoSlack seems more like an official meeting room than a cafeteria. Cafeteria is a messenger on my personal phone.
- dugluak 9y agoof course if you are in group chat on slack. One on One messages with friends with in the company, except your managers etc, cant be a cafeteria conversation?
- darkstar999 9y agoI had a toxic manager who would screenshot DMs and post them publicly. Just consider any work communication of any form to be public.
- gumby 9y agoIt's hard to see how this is bad -- they have/should be able to have access to your other work-related communication and work product (modulo the weird rules around things like salespersons' "rolodex"es). It's so easy to have private channels these days it's hard to see how this should even inconvenience anyone.
- yiiii 9y agoBecause it is illegal in many countries to access somebody's personal communication even if it uses eg. a corporate email address?
- Jenssen1234 9y agoIt's not, not in Europe, not anywhere. Saying it a couple of times doesnt make it true. Your boss can read your emails and most likely already does. This is exactly the same with any internal messaging and it's perfectly legal in the workspace.
- enzo1982 9y agoThe European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that an employee's communication may not be monitored without prior notice and without specific reasons. [1] [1] https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-rule-of-law/-/echr-monitoring-an-employee-s-electronic-communications-amounted-to-a-breach-of-his-right-to-private-life https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-rule-of-law/-/echr-m...
- gumby 9y agoWherever you work in the USA there's a note in the employee handbook saying that the company may monitor any communications using company equipment for any business purpose, which is completely consistent with that ruling (and, even if it applied in the us, would render it moot).
- enzo1982 9y ago
- MisterBastahrd 9y agoThis is the greatest advertisement for IRC ever.
- Ascetik 9y agoI still prefer IRC, it irked me when my favorite sysadmin channel moved from freenode to slack.
- lwhalen 9y agoCome hang out in #lopsa on Freenode, we never left ;-)
- darkstar999 9y agoNo it isn't. They would own the IRC server and see everything.
- ben509 9y agoI think Off the Record encryption on IRC is done entirely by the clients, so the server can only store an encrypted blob. It also has forward secrecy. There's no reason you couldn't do the same with a slack client, of course, but your employer could see you had encrypted chats.
- 089723645897236 9y agoThis is a good thing. People need to realize work chat is a paper trail...
- ben509 9y agoAs a society, we're having a very hard time adjusting to all kinds of social media.
- alexandercrohde 9y agoA one-way paper trail in favor of the company. If a boss tells me I'm fired for being "too black" and then deletes my slack (and I don't have a screenshot), I'm not going to have any leverage to get proof unless I can get a subpoena (which I wouldn't be able to, most likely)
- bdowling 9y agoI think you’re wrong. A subpoena would probably be granted for a situation where you know that the relevant evidence exists and exactly where it is. But it might not come to that in the scenario you describe, since the employer would also know that a third party has this incredibly damning evidence and would likely try to settle.
- moduspol 9y agoIf it helps, the company is the one paying for that paper trail.
- nkcmr 9y agoI have never really understood the notion of needing communication privacy in the workplace. To be honest, without having seen this story, I would have assumed this was a feature of Slack already! I can't remember where/when I heard this advice but it seems relevant and helpful for this matter: "Write/speak all communication in the workplace as if the CEO themselves were CCd on the email." It has served me well.
- ben509 9y agoWork is stressful and communication can reach straight into your brain. People go through periods where they're not handling stress very well, and they will often express ideas that, divorced from the context of the stress and bad feelings they have at that point, don't reflect what they really believe or intend to say in public.
- moduspol 9y agoI think that part's easy to understand. The tougher part is why one would put that communication in text, enter it into a company-provided system, and then be offended / dumbfounded when it's accessed by one's superiors at that company. We all get stressed sometimes, but we don't all do that.
- dumbfounder 9y agoLet's clarify a bit, this is for the employer owned Slack workspace. If you have the client and have your employer workspace and then another random workspace that is not owned by your employer, then they can only see the messages on the workspace owned by the company. And this is meant for backups really, it's not going to be easy to just follow random conversations of yours on a daily basis. If they want to go back and dig up some dirt they can though. That said, if you are worried about it, and working on a computer owned by your employer, you should just assume everything you do is logged. Because some do that.
- jrs95 9y agoIt seems like this requires Slack Plus and not just the Standard plan. It's not clear to me if you can access all historical data immediately after upgrading to Plus, though.
- cirgue 9y ago> Let's clarify a bit, this is for the employer owned Slack workspace. My company doesn't use slack, but it is a little crazy to me that this wasn't already the case for employer-owned workspaces.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoIs this available for Gsuite as well? My former office had employees mocking others for their age, gender, etc. No way to show management without revealing I'd found a way to spy on them.
- jgh 9y agoI'm glad that this isn't going to affect the free tier users (rather, they'll need to provide legal reasoning for it and consent) since there are a bunch of communities on slack.
- neposesame 9y agoCould this be backdated upon upgrade to enterprise i.e the admin is able to access private conversations prior to upgrade from free tier?
- Dirlewanger 9y agoI dislike Slack as much as the next guy, but I honestly thought this was already the case. It was in general for work emails, why would it be any different for another office communication tool? Shouldn't be a surprise for anyone.
- Arubis 9y agoFor companies, yeah, this makes sense. It was nice when this wasn't true, but never really expected nor required. Unfortunately, Slack also gets used for a lot of OSS communities. Arguably this was already a poor fit, but now it's even more obviously a mismatched relationship; it's unclear whether one could just start paying for a Slack account and immediately pull all DM history for something that didn't come with the expectation of corporate ownership. #freenodeforlyfe, I suppose.
- zifnab06 9y agoRocket Chat is something I've been looking into. It's...well pretty amazing so far. Open source, self hosted, bridges to slack fairly reasonably, and gives IRC style permissions. Slightly nicer for the "I'm not always logged in"/"We need a log bot" issues IRC has had.
- ianmiers 9y agoIf it's self hosted, then DMs cannot be private from the company/organization since they literally have root on the box.
- er0k 9y ago> it's unclear whether one could just start paying for a Slack account and immediately pull all DM history for something that didn't come with the expectation of corporate ownership I've tried. In my experience, Slack will not approve your compliance export application without articles of incorporation.
- Avery3R 9y agosome projects are moving over to discord
- brokentone 9y agoAs a basic user of the platform (where my employer has Slack Enterprise Grid), I've always expected this is the case and planned my communication accordingly.
- drinchev 9y agoLooking at all positive comments here, this is generally a bad news. Not sure how much compliant this is with the law, but in this case the law should be more protective towards employees. I imagine the following situation I write on a company-owned piece of paper - "My boss is an idiot". Then take this piece of paper put it in an envelope ( owned by the company as well ), write the name of my colleague and seal the envelope. Then put the envelope on the recipient's desk. I bet it would be illegal for my boss to take that letter, open it and read it. P.S. Looks like with e-mails the law is more protective towards employees : [1] : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-privacy-emails-echr/european-court-rules-companies-must-tell-employees-of-email-checks-idUSKCN1BG0YA https://www.reuters.com/article/us-privacy-emails-echr/europ... [2] : http://www.internationallawoffice.com/Newsletters/Employment-Benefits/Luxembourg/Castegnaro/Reading-employees-private-emails-exposes-employer-to-criminal-liability http://www.internationallawoffice.com/Newsletters/Employment... [3] : https://www.womblebonddickinson.com/uk/insights/articles-and-briefings/right-private-life-work-monitoring-employees-communications-was https://www.womblebonddickinson.com/uk/insights/articles-and...
- dsacco 9y ago> Not sure how much compliant this is with the law, but in this case the law should be more protective towards employees. This change is precisely because of regulations like GDPR, among others.
- kuschku 9y agoThe ECHR said that the employer has no right to access any private employee communication, even if it happened at work. That contradicts what you’re saying quite a bit.
- dsacco 9y agoIt doesn't contradict what I'm saying. If you mean the Romanian case, the ultimate resolution was that 1) an employee has an expectation of privacy for personal communication on personal channels on a corporate machine, and 2) if an employee's personal internet usage is going to be monitored on a corporate machine, they must know before the monitoring begins. The ECHR didn't have any problem with the monitoring in general; what they ruled against was the legality of personal internet usage monitoring before the employee knew about it and agreed. In the ECHR case, the employee's personal communications over an instant messenger were being monitored just because they were happening on the employer's machine, and without the employee knowing ahead of time. That's the no-no. But Slack is not a personal communications medium; it's maintained and administrated directly by an employer for the explicit purpose of work-related communication. In the context of the ECHR case, Slack doesn't qualify. Circling back to Slack and the GDPR: as a direct result of the GDPR, Slack now needs to align their desire for full employee auditability with full data transparency. There's a tension between competing regulations, but there's no contradiction here.
- billions 9y agoControlling thoughts reduces creativity
- anotheryou 9y agoDoes this affect the basic plan? If upgrading to Plus, does it include past messages?
- makpy 9y ago#deleteSlack
- alexandercrohde 9y agoJesus, nobody here has any clue what they're talking about. Slack has allowed companies to read private messages for well over a year. It has been called "compliance exports" and you as a slack user could always see if you had them turned on, as well as which individuals had access to read your private messages. Source: CTO of a unicorn confirmed he had used this feature to read private communications (private rooms and DMs), source 2 - used this page myself at multiple companies Employers had to pay for this privilege. It's super unclear to me what the new policy is-- it looks like there's still no privacy but it happens via API.
- froindt 9y agoPreviously if compliance exports were turned off, then later turned on, users would receive a notification that all future DM's would be available for export by their employer. My understanding is that now the entire archive is readily available for download, including the content from before compliance exports was turned on.
- hjnilsson 9y agoHow fine-grained is the tool? Do you select a channel and export only the contents of that? Can you select only two users and only get messages between them? Or is it blunt and you simple download all data (the text makes it seem that way)? I ask, because if it's the latter it borders on illegal to click on that button (and get ALL private conversations), at the very least it needs to be heavily regulated within the firm who can click it and how the downloaded data is stored / accessed.
- wrs 9y agoIt is incredibly blunt, at least for compliance exports — all you can do is export the whole workspace — and once exported it's just a ZIP of thousands of JSON files. There is no tool to look at it with. When I had to do an export I found a PHP script somebody had written to turn the JSON into thousands of HTML files, but otherwise it was grep and jq.
- 9y ago
- ljubo_opaki 9y agohttps://gph.is/1maiw0M https://gph.is/1maiw0M This sucks so much. Does anybody know if deleted messages get deleted for real? Or only just marked as deleted in the database? This couldn't be an early April Fools joke, could it?
- colemorrison 9y agoWow. Ya know, for every case this might "help" solve (workplace harassment and the like), I just can't help but say ultimately it will hurt far more. "But employers/managers/execs will operate more responsibly with more data about their employees!" Will they really? I think they'll be able to operate more "powerfully" with respect to controlling employees... but with that power I wouldn't be surprised if the abuse outweighs the positive utility. Additionally... this is going to kind of kill the culture between people (ESPECIALLY REMOTE) using slack. Do you really want to talk about your weekend, or forge any type of bond over chat now? Why would anyone every do anything rapport building over slack now? Yeah yeah "but managers/employers won't be that extreme, you're being extreme." There's a lot of cases in the past where I've thought "sure an exec or manager wouldn't do X" and then sure enough, there it is at the top of HN, and the company is going under. So...someone else on here speculated correctly. It's clearly a selling point for employers since they're the main target to increase revenue. Unfortunately I guess that means using it for interest groups goes out the window though.
- always_good 9y agoIf this is what finally makes you behave appropriately on work comms and start communicating out of band, then they are doing your future a favor. It should have been common sense.
- vernie 9y agoI'm surprised that Slack was so widely adopted without this capability already available.
- reificator 9y agoLike everyone else I'm more shocked that this wasn't available by default. I'm not sure if this applies to the last (work) Slack I was part of. The company blocked it over a year ago and presumably deleted it shortly after. I just checked and it is deleted now. As far as I know, since it was setup by a middle manager (who lasted two weeks) and then blocked, it was probably on the free plan as well. I'm not really concerned for myself, as I always assume all my interactions on a work machine are monitored, but people did occasionally send me things that they probably wanted to be off the record. Not sure if I should warn them that there's a (small) chance that their messages could now be read.
- akerro 9y ago*can access. In some countries it's illegal for employer to read employees private messages.
- iamdave 9y agoI'm finding myself in a situation where this is actually kind of welcome news involving a workplace bully who operates via DM. I'm moving on very soon, but I've shared many of our interactions with management, management has even seen first hand how he openly insults other engineers. Instead of doing anything about it, management announced we had been acquired and over the course of about 12 days slowly resigned leaving us with the new company. New company promoted the bully. Hopefully others speak up as I have and this new feature can help some people get relief from the guy.
- bspn 9y agoI don't understand how this feature changes anything? If he operates via DM them you and his other victims can pretty easily share the evidence with management today. I don't think this feature is going to a be a magic cure-all where management pro-actively monitors communications for this type of behavior - it will still require individual(s) to escalate a complaint that management can then investigate.
- iamdave 9y agoIn our unique case, it would have meant we could have exported old DMs from users who have since left the company after a recent merger. I'm using my example to think forward: an employee leaves due to workplace conflicts, and later (not to intimate this is the path I'm taking, I'm merely walking out the door, as my issue was a mere personality conflict not something that I can seek damages over) pursues civil action, a responsible export and archive policy from HR the way IT departments may sometimes be required to retain email messages for a period of time can be a benefit if the departed employee cites their interactions with an abusive manager for their departure and subsequent litigation. Other commenters have referenced this as well.
- BLanen 9y agoI don't know why people assumed they couldn't. Before this, they would've been behind, at max, a subpoena, right?
- technological 9y agoI think this holds true for all slack teams I joined online. Online i mean, like golang slack or any other community created slack team I joined. Is this correct ?
- brazzledazzle 9y agoThey had compliance exports and I wish they'd stuck with that since turning them on notified everyone that your employer could now see everything and prevented them from exporting anything private prior to that. I know why they did this but a compromise could have been found. With this ability someone can dump everything and just read through it with users none-the-wiser. If users read the previous documentation they'd even believe they were safe from snooping and would be notified when it started. At least with compliance exports the users were informed and had privacy.
- jcims 9y agoThis will open up Slack to industries that frown upon creating communication channels between employees that cannot be recorded. http://bizblog.blackberry.com/2015/07/chatrooms-in-finance-whats-all-the-fuss-about/ http://bizblog.blackberry.com/2015/07/chatrooms-in-finance-w...
- thefifthsetpin 9y agoNah. Slack was already open to them. You just had to enable the compliance audits. This is mostly interesting only because it's retroactive. A fact which of course wouldn't matter for anyone that wasn't already using slack.
- baxtr 9y agoThat’s probably a very good reason to fall back to WhatsApp or whatever else for things I don’t want my employer to read.
- benatkin 9y agoIt's an email replacement. Seems like an obvious choice to me.
- phillipwills 9y agoAlways assume any communication on your work network can and will be monitored... If you want a private discussion, best to do it in person or on your own devices, not using any company resources.
- acangiano 9y agoTraveling all the way to Lanchasire seems excessive. Surely you can just have the conversation in person. ;)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kawsper 9y agoThis might break EU law, at least e-mails marked private are considered private, so your employer can't snoop in those.
- dep_b 9y agoI always assumed they could. As I always assume that basically everything I trust to a computer system could be public.
- intopieces 9y agoI thought this was a feature all along. From an HR and legal perspective, this is necessary, right? My emails on the company server are subject to discovery. I was coached at onboarding on what I could and could not say in an email. Down to, "when it doubt, schedule a call."
- crescentfresh 9y agoOn a semi-side topic: Canadian dev here, I always immediately hard delete e-mail correspondence (both inbox and sent) with HR on anything that I feel private about, as I don't want the guys in IT reading it. I know they don't, but I also know they can. For example, I might trust the head of IT but I might not trust that new intern or "new guy" they just hired. What do you guys do when it comes to HR correspondence at your places of work?
- bpicolo 9y agoWhat do you mean "hard delete"? If your place of work is using any of the big cloud email services, they should be able to get at those emails regardless of whether you've deleted them.
- unit91 9y agoWell, there's nothing I can really do about it. When I hit "delete", my company email doesn't actually get deleted. It just disappears from my view. I believe the stated policy is they delete after 3 years post "delete". If I worked in or near the office, I'd walk over to HR and request printouts instead of emails, but since I work remotely, I'm stuck.
- zcrackerz 9y agoAre you certain that IT can't read deleted emails? I would think there would be backups and logs in the email server.
- bradyd 9y agoThis does not necessarily prevent them from being able to read these emails. If the email system has journaling enabled then a copy of every email sent and received is retained.
- joosters 9y agoWith most corporate email systems, I'm pretty sure you can't hard delete any message. Sure, it may no longer show up in your inbox but it won't be vanishing off of the compliance logs.
- 9y ago
- xstephen95x 9y agoSo then employees just switch to Signal for DMs...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mayneack 9y agoI read the message retention policy as a true delete for anyone not wanting to get their previously private messages grandfathered into a newly non-private policy. Slack warns you for a channel that setting the retention policy is "truly, permanently deleted. These messages can't be restored or recovered, even by Slack" https://i.imgur.com/63x2oee.png https://i.imgur.com/63x2oee.png https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Customize-message-and-file-retention-policies https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Customize...
- keeler 9y agoUse slack-cleaner[1] to nuke messages you've sent. You need to generate a legacy token[2]. [1] https://github.com/kfei/slack-cleaner https://github.com/kfei/slack-cleaner [2] https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens
- redblacktree 9y agoDoes this actually delete anything or just flag it as deleted?
- Spoom 9y agoI suspect that if they allow admins to download DMs, they also probably soft-delete messages, so deleted messages would still show up in the exports. Can anyone confirm?
- wrs 9y agoFor compliance exports at least, preserving deletes and edits is an option you can set.
- neves 9y agoIf you publicize that you can read the messages, no problem. I had a boss that liked to spy in the private messages of the employees without their knowledge. A bunch of interns started to privately create offensive nicknames for a fat employee. They didn't used the name in public. The read and started to use to use the nicknames in his conversation. Well, this guy also publish jobs ads for our old tech stack with a false company name to see if any of his employees were applying. Talk to me about lack of ethic.
- EGreg 9y agoI think Gitter is architected differently and doesn't allow this. Your private chats aren't in the context of some company, but the network. Again, look at this everybody! We are relying on some third parties merely to facilitate our conversations! And they are relying on the "SAAS" developer who hosts all the conversations (not open source) to determine one-size-fits-all rules. This is nearly 2020, why is it still the norm?
- kingnight 9y agoAs an owner of a free slack that has thousands of historical and unaccessible messages by the users, how can I delete these stored but not unaccessible messages to protect them? It seems unconscionable that Slack retains messages but provides no way to remove them without paying.
- thanatropism 9y agoMy employment contract says something to the effect of "using internet facilities for work only". I mean, duh. I have a cellphone with a 4G signal that I pay for. What next, employers are going to be able to choose the color of elevator buttons. Tyranny!
- tptacek 9y agoHow is this possibly news? Besides the fact than Slack has let owners read DMs through compliance export since forever, most company Slacks authenticate via mail (usually Google mail), which your employer controls. This is no different than company emails, which (I hope this isn't surprising) your employer can also read. Don't have personal conversations on your company Slack!
- kuschku 9y ago> Don't have personal conversations on your company Slack! You may be discussing unionization on your company Slack, though, and the employer may now use that against you. There’s a lot more than strictly work-related content, and strictly private content. A huge grey area is inbetween, and the employer shouldn’t be able to access any of them (and as the ECHR ruled, the employer may now)
- tptacek 9y agoIf you’re worried about that, don’t use company Slack. But you should know that federal law protects employee organizing, especially for unions; if your employer retaliates, you can bring a claim against them.
- guelo 9y agoBased on experience I have somewhat related advice for employees: don't connect your personal phone to the office wifi.
- ggregoire 9y agoI'm always surprised by the amount of DMs people send in Slack. I've worked in 2 companies using Slack and, in both, about 80% of the total messages were DMs. It seems crazy high to me. I wonder if people just send all day private stuff unrelated to work, or if people have trouble with trust and transparence on the workspace..
- simonbw 9y agoI don't find that surprising. Most of the communications I have at work are with a specific person, not with a whole channel. It's not because I don't want other people to know what I'm saying to someone, it's that I don't want to bother them with stuff that isn't relevant to them.
- ggregoire 9y agoHow do you know you bother them? Your comment makes me think to daily meetings in SCRUM. Sure most of the stuff people are working on or that blocks them is not relevant to everyone else, but we do it because it's good for the whole team to share and stay up-to-date on what is going on. As a tech lead/manager, I apply the same logic for my communication. I use DMs only for stuff that shouldn't be discussed publicly.
- heartbreak 9y agoI use DMs to avoid spamming my entire team with a discussion that only relates to one other member.
- sundvor 9y agoPerhaps people don't feel like spamming a number of people with a conversation that only needs two participants.
- mbritton72 9y agoGlad this is happening. It's not fair to use DMs to form alliances against colleagues in order to increase one's bottom line. That is exactly what I've observed in agencies that run on Slack. If life is a game, this is a backdoor worth closing.
- aquadrop 9y agoYour problem is with people, not slack, they can just go to skype or whatever tool they want.
- postit 9y agoIn the end that's your responsibility to maintain professional level when using internal company tools. Not surprisingly the three persons who forwarded me this thread with comments like: "shit", "is this legal or allowed?", or even "I'm screwed if they read my messages" - are the ones who are always trash talking colleagues, pairs and the company itself.
- MarcScott 9y agoI had just assumed this was the case anyway. I used to be a teacher, and have recommended Slack to an old colleague as a way facilitate staff communication at their school. Additionally my current organization quite often works with children at workshops and the like. For an admin not to be able to look through DMs is a serious safeguarding issue, so I'm happy this is now possible.
- mbrumlow 9y agoAnd with that slack is not something I will be using. Way to mess up a good thing.
- sergiotapia 9y agoI've always assumed that was the case. Company stuff is company stuff, don't assume otherwise.
- sakuronto 9y agoAfter dropping IRC supoort, this makes two controversial changes in a very short span of time. Did something change at Slack?
- emodendroket 9y agoI had assumed they already did this.
- cvaidya1986 9y agoThis will help the regional manager detect any secret employee after work house parties.
- aaron695 9y ago> In the email they seem to be blaming GDPR, by making this ability retroactive does anyone know if they are contradicting their earlier privacy policy? Updates to our Privacy Policy and tools Hello, Slack is committed to helping teams around the world work better, together. As part of our growth and in support of upcoming changes to EU data protection law, we’re launching new tools and features and updating our Privacy Policy and User Terms. Here’s a quick summary of the changes: Improved clarity and transparency. We’ve re-organized our Privacy Policy to make it clearer and more understandable, defined key terms, described our data processing practices and included examples showing how Slack implements this Policy. GDPR updates. The upcoming General Data Protection Regulation places new obligations on organizations that process EU personal data. As a result, we’re updating our Privacy Policy and User Terms to better explain our relationship with our customers and users. Tools and features. We’re introducing a profile deletion tool, updating our import and export tools, and improving our workspace settings center so you can see your team’s plan, admins and settings. We hope these updates will help make work a little more pleasant and productive, wherever you’re based. Need assistance? Drop us a note at feedback@slack.com. And as always, thank you for using Slack. The team at Slack
- gaius 9y agoWhenever I’ve been a SA I wouldn’t let a manager access an employee’s email without written authorisation from HR. How does that work here, what are the safeguards?
- iamleppert 9y agoPart of the reason why Slack has been so successful vs. other corporate messaging solutions is that it encourages employees to bring their “whole self” to work. It’s perhaps the most important thing at work to feel like you can communicate easily and without fear of reprisal from managers and in my opinion had a lot to do with my extensive use of Slack. It felt like, for the first time, the communications platform wasn’t “owned” by the strict hierarchy of the company. I created my own channels, and felt no fear when I communicated with co-workers. I wasn’t doing anything “wrong” ever in my communications, but, let’s face it: there are things that you don’t want your boss to know, especially if like the majority of people, you’re working for a bad boss that has to be “managed” himself. If Slack continues in this manner, while it may make sense from a liability and business perspective, employees aren’t going to trust the platform anymore the first time a manager reads a private conversation and uses it against someone. And generally I’ve found it’s not hard to figure out you’re being spied upon. I’m not sure what the solution is, but definitely if Slack allows managers private access (without a court order or similar serious situation where such access would be warranted), they can no longer claim they want employees to “bring their whole self” to work anymore. Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
- tapsboy 9y agoI agree. It feels like Slack broke our trust. I don't have any records, but do remember slack in it's earlier days promised of not sharing private communication to the employers and sending the logs directly to govt agencies or 3rd party audit agencies.
- savanaly 9y agoYep. I work totally remotely and Slack felt fundamentally different to email: my extensive DM's with coworkers felt very analogous to physical contact. Sometimes, if you're working in an office, you just want to lean back in your chair and whisper to your coworker "what a fuckin awful meeting, what was [boss] thinkin?". And as a full-time remote worker, Slack was the only place for that. I feel this will make 100% remote a lot tougher and more isolating because the life-line that was private contact has been severed.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
- xwvvvvwx 9y agoVery surprised to find that this was not already the case. In general I think you should assume that all communication on a work provided tool are not private. Private conversations belong on whatsapp / signal.
- geggam 9y agopidgin / adium OTR has been around for a long time.... for a reason
- tootie 9y agoThere's actually a Slack competitor called Symphony that exists solely because it allows thorough auditing/monitoring/spying on all communications. It's ugly and is missing a ton of features. It's used by a bunch of financial services firms that have a lot of compliance rules they can't enforce with Slack. This move is probably to start getting Slack into that space.
- mulmen 9y agoThe surprising thing to me is that this was not already a feature of Slack. Isn’t the ability to view employee communication a very basic requirement of corporate communication platforms? Does anyone have an expectation of privacy on any corporate infrastructure? I certainly never have.
- thefifthsetpin 9y agoYesterday, a private channel existed where your employee Jim may have mentioned to his friend and coworker that he had a date with his male partner. Today, that data became available to you. You were planning to fire Jim, but now there's a risk that it would look discriminatory. Do you risk a wrongful termination lawsuit and dragging your company's name through the mud? You could check his slack messages to assess that risk, but if you do find something then you're in an even worse situation. This seems like the same minefield as asking an employee to login to his facebook. The main difference is that this time, slack did it to you -- you were not given a chance to opt-out.
- jimktrains2 9y agoWait a month and then do it while making sure you have a clear case. I believe similar advice is given if there is an OSHA check -- since you can't know why you were checked, it's best to wait before firing anyone for non-blatant/egregious, even if it's with cause and evidence. > This seems like the same minefield as asking an employee to login to his facebook. How is this like facebook? It's a corporate medium, just like email would be, or like a company-run XMPP or IRC server.
- thefifthsetpin 9y agoIt's like facebook in that the employees had a guarantee of privacy (insofar as most private communication is private; obviously the recipient can expose the message, or someone can coerce you to login to your account). Some people are waving this away with, "oh, probably the employee signed some contract saying that it wasn't private" but even if that's often true it's of course sometimes not true. Certainly I've never signed a contract with that kind of clause, but I've generally worked for small companies. I suppose there's nothing preventing a company from using facebook as a corporate communication medium. That'd of course not a good idea since they don't have access to some of what goes on at facebook. The same thing was true for slack. Some companies used slack without considering that the data wasn't really under their control, which was perhaps not a good idea. This change is akin to facebook recognizing that blunder, and "fixing" it by making DMs between employees available to their employer.
- thrillgore 9y agoI'm disappointed, but not surprised. If you are on a company network, assume everything you do is logged.
- orbitur 9y agoSo my longstanding "never write anything in corporate correspondence that I wouldn't want revealed some day" principle seems like a great one. Seriously. It's not your platform, they are not your emails, they are not your chatlogs, and you should never act as if what you put in will remain private and yours to control.
- rsuelzer 9y agoI can't seem find the article where an employer was sued for failing to inform authoritied about a monitored work email that indicated one of their employees was about to commit suicide. I'm not sure what ever happened in that case.
- jedberg 9y agoYou can tell who here has worked for a large American company and who hasn't. If you've ever worked for a large American company, you know that nothing you do on company equipment or with a service the company pays for is ever private, and you should never assume it is. I'll be honest, I always thought Slack DMs were viewable by the admin. As a Slack admin myself, I always assumed I had that ability. Never used so, I never found out I was wrong, but just always assumed it was there. To me this is a no-op: Anyone who worked for a large American company should have assumed that this ability was always there or could be there in the future, or at the very least, your employer could have always required you to log in and show them your DMs.
- Cacti 9y agoIt is very odd. We've had corporate monitoring of practically all employee electronic activities for decades. It's enshrined in legislation and tested in case law. The capabilities are built into practically every major business software. There are whole industries built up around it. Yet suddenly everyone is losing their mind over some corporate IMs just because it's Slack? I feel like I'm on Reddit, not a site ostensibly catering to _computer professionals and experts_.
- lwhalen 9y agoI know in general there's the whole "the company pays for it, the company owns it, the company can audit it" corportesse oblige, enshrined in case-law yada yada, but one of the things I always liked about Slack was it seemed to have a bit of that old counter-culture sneer around "yeah, that may be true, but we code for the user anyway". This is very much an anti-user, pro-corporate maneuver, and I think it's a shock to many who took Slack's long-time messaging to the contrary at face-value.
- bbarn 9y agoThe difference is their privacy policy has been changed retroactively against the good faith their users had. That's the problem. Of course if it's corporate it's usually monitored, but when Slack championed the user and only catered to the company when forced (via compliance reports which told you they were enabled) and now suddenly switches to a model where past contracts are broken, people have a right to be upset.
- sirmike_ 9y agoBear in mind my opinion is coming from the US ITOps perspective, outside of this my opinion may not travel as far pun intended re:the rest of the world. There are a lot of out of touch concerns here in regards to privacy. I think this basically shows the diff between INDependent devs and employEE devs. At any point in time a company who owns and pays for all IT related accounts and services can look, monitor, export disable, enable, delete, log or secure their systems as they need to either by compliance requirements, legal, policy or for any business or nonbusiness reason at anytime. At the least you do not have a right to privacy to at the best limited privacy when communicating on a company provided communications platform. Most companies worth their salt have this written down in their company handbook or manual etc. Most companies also have reasonable "you may use company systems for limited private exchanges" This is even more true when the company has government or gov facing clients or does business in certain market sectors like Finance. It is good to see the new kid on the block (Slack) is growing up and getting more focused on its core business clients: companies/b2b. The same goes for company provided laptops, equipment. I think it is also super important above all that the vast majority of people and companies enter into these things in good faith and reasonableness. We just do not live in a world where the honor system can be the only safeguard for these things. And of course with all things businessey -- the more money is riding on top of something -- the more important it is to be wise in regards to risk in and out of business matters.
- deltaprotocol 9y agoReading the comments it seems nobody is concerned about this broad access leading to sexual harassment of women who are constantly exposed to glances and stronger forms of abuse and may vent in a private channel, or may have discussed intimate concerns with friends (now past conversations are also available). Nobody paints the picture of the boss reading girls logs? This is pathetic. US, land of the well paid slaves.
- draw_down 9y agoI mean, who didn't see that coming. Definitely don't say shit you don't want them to hear on Slack, or work email for that matter.
- asow92 9y agoIf you don't trust your employees enough maintain private discourse, why would you hire them in the first place?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eecc 9y agoIllegal in any country with just about decent employee protection. Looking forward to the lawsuits in EU
- Cacti 9y agoHate to break it to you, but this is not illegal in the EU.
- jasonlotito 9y agoEU court of human rights disagrees with you. https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Press_Q_A_Barbulescu_ENG.PDF https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Press_Q_A_Barbulescu_ENG....
- dbalan 9y agoThis is going to be a problem for open source communities that use a semi-public slack as the communication platform. I don't think the users expect the DMs to be public to the project admin. Its not necessarily bad. Bit it might be time for those communities to move.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- foobaw 9y agoYou should never talk about extremely personal / private stuff via DMs anyway. I don't really care if my employer could read my DMs because they're mostly work-related small talk anyway.
- gitpusher 9y agoGood. If you have to say something work-inapproriate, don't use your work communication tools.
- MarcScott 9y agoIMHO I don't think this is a fair title change. What is important here is the fact that access to DMs have changed. Not that the general import/export tools have changed. If Google changed their TOS to suddenly make everyone's search history public, would the title read "Google changes TOS"?
- bgentry 9y agoAgreed, and all the past comments are about this one specific controversial change.
- kossae 9y agoThis confused me as well, especially after coming back to it after the change. I had assumed some other Slack post went up and received equally or greater activity than the original post.
- savanaly 9y agoI agree, and this is the first time I can ever recall disagreeing with one of HN's admin title corrections that I noticed.
- shkkmo 9y agoI thought this was a totally new item, a lot of the comments don't make sense without the old title
- isatty 9y agoYes, especially because I read the comments when the title was more accurate and came back thinking this was a new submission. This is a completely irrelevant title.
- ravitation 9y agoEven "Slack changes DM import/export" would be a better title. This current title I find to actually be almost completely unacceptable.
- paulie_a 9y agoPersonally I assumed that capability was always available. So it was interesting when I received a private SMS about this story from a coworker.
- RRRA 9y agoSo how does one delete his previous history before he was made aware of this change?! in other news, I guess this means shadow IT is back in style! :P
- amriksohata 9y agoGoodbye slack, time to delete you like Facebook too
- reagent 9y agoI have a rudimentary tool (written in Ruby) that can be used to delete your history across channels & DMs that might come in handy: https://gitlab.com/reagent/slack-purge https://gitlab.com/reagent/slack-purge
- downer72 9y agoThis is basically the end of Slack for me. It's over. I'm done. I am now anti-slack. I am an opponent of slack. You had me, but now you lost me.
- isatty 9y agoWhy was the title of this submission changed?
- jeznag 9y agoOld news https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/24/7255199/slack-alters-privacy-policy-to-let-bosses-read-your-messages https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/24/7255199/slack-alters-pri...
- mbrumlow 9y agoI am mostly worried about the bait and switch. If this feature was only applied to messages after the announcement then that would be fine. I am sure many of you have had conversations over slack thinking well it was okay because nobody could see them.
- forgotmypw 9y agoI've always assumed everything I type on a work machine is property of my employer, and thus can be reviewed, copied, etc. I find astounding how many companies use a third-party messaging system for all their communications. Do they not realize that anyone with access to Slack's data can read their stuff? That's over 1,000 people[1] if you only count Slack employees! Do you really think that competitors or blackhats are above blackmailing or paying one of them for a data dump? [1] As of March 2018, according to this Mashable article: https://mashable.com/2018/03/10/how-slack-uses-slack/ https://mashable.com/2018/03/10/how-slack-uses-slack/