Here in Ireland, we have pretty strict legislation around surveillance in the workplace. Any monitoring has to fulfil the three requirements of being necessary,

Here in Ireland, we have pretty strict legislation around surveillance in the workplace. Any monitoring has to fulfil the three requirements of being necessary, legitimate, and proportional. It has already been demonstrated that monitoring employee email to ensure that confidential information is not being shared is not consider proportionate (in a normal workplace), so I don't believe that monitoring direct messages in Slack would be lawful here.