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List of European organizations that have banned personal messaging apps at work
- spwa4 3mo agoTLDR: yes, governments in favor of Chat Control legislation want to make absolutely sure it doesn't apply to them.
- inigyou 3mo agoChat Control 1 or 2?
- retired 3mo agoMeanwhile in Spain I use WhatsApp to contact the municipality, the GP uses it to send my blood results and package delivery drivers ask me to share my location. I hate it.
- mschild 3mo agoWhy not delete it? I assume that if you don't have it, they offer some other form of communication with you?
- amelius 3mo agoVery funny.
- reedciccio 3mo agoYes, they do but they require walking to their office and deal with paper or call them during ever shrinking office hours. Take your poison.
- jagged-chisel 3mo agoPick your poison. “Take” sounds too threatening.
- amelius 3mo ago"Inject" is clearly the right word here.
- dp-hackernews 3mo agoActually... Shakespeare’s Othello (c. 1603‑1604) Iago says to Othello: “Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, / … O, thou wilt choose thy poison, and be damned!”
- amelius 3mo agoShakespeare did not have to deal with today's tech problems.
- retired 3mo agoThanks for typing the exact reply I wanted to give! Yes, I’m happy that I can request garbage pickup through WhatsApp instead of having to fill out a form at the municipal building. An online portal or app would be even better than WhatsApp.
- tsimionescu 3mo agoWould you rather they used Teams? Or what would be a better alternative? Phone / email?
- retired 3mo agoSome secure online portal would be nice for the GP or municipality. The delivery issues can be solved by introducing a standardized address system for Spain but that would take decades to roll out. Some people I know don’t even have an address, they just use the land registry number. Or just the name of their village + surnames, which is typically good enough for the standard mail (but not good enough for DHL/UPS/DPD packages, their drivers want your location via WhatsApp)
- dizhn 3mo agoThe 2016 coup attempt in Turkey was organized entirely on whatsapp. All of the conversations were recovered from multiple phones too.
- Yokohiii 3mo agoI don't understand why they put this up like it's working in their favor. Their website doesn't explain anything extraordinary that makes them different from the average chat app, except that it is europe based.
- inigyou 3mo agoWhat would possibly differentiate a chat app?
- Almondsetat 3mo agoE2EE? F/OSS? P2P?
- inigyou 3mo agoIn reality, they don't, not really. The only important differentiator is whether your friends use it and whether you have to self-host a server to use it (which has a large impact upon point 1).
- yeputons 3mo agoIt works reliably and without surprises. Messages are not lost. No weird errors. Features: easy to switch devices, including PC. File transfers. Video sharing. Audio-to-text conversion out of the box.
- williamdclt 3mo agoI'm not reading anything in this article that seems to pretend like it's working in their favour? It's just an article from a company about their industry, companies do that all the time for brand recognition, building trust (showing expertise in their domain), and educating potential customers about why they might need this sort of product (lead generation).
- blitzar 3mo agoIf anything it is highlighting the pointlessness of any new messaging platform. Companies can and should lock down to the platform that comes with their subscription for everything else - and for all personal matters that is locked down with network effects by sms, whatsapp & wechat. You could maybe make the case for a federated - email like - messaging service for inter company / party communications. Matrix basically ...
- benny_s 3mo agoAt least for the financial institutions on this list, I can say they have no other choice. Regulation forces them to log everything to avoid insider trading, etc. Any communication outside of their internal systems can't be logged and is therefore a compliance risk.
- sigmoid10 3mo agoGDPR guarantees a right to privacy even on work devices. I think you need to filter out personal messages if compliance requires logging.
- JoeBOFH 3mo agoAs much as I prefer the European way of some items. I think the American way of treating the work computer as a company asset and just locking it down to an insane degree makes way more sense. Especially for areas like finance.
- nekusar 3mo agoExactly this. I've been in a lawsuit with Oracle (as engineer, not direct). And their discovery hit EVERYTHING. If I used work devices for personal messages, my personal messages would absolutely been in scope. Or if I used personal devices for work, my personal devices are now in scope. Hell NO! My work laptop is on my personal network. Its also on its own vlan and can only talk to the imternet, and not fellow devices. And I can attest to that as much if I'm ever called in for a discovery hearing.
- stack529 3mo ago[dead]
- weinzierl 3mo ago"ban personal messaging apps at work" What does that even mean? I doubt you can forbid the usage of personal messaging apps except in very exceptional cases (like a court room). On the other hand: Using personal messaging apps for work related information is a no-go anyway because of confidentiality agreements basically everyone signs.
- rock_artist 3mo agoI also didn't fully understand if the context is: - Ban ANY use of your personal chats / device at work (eg. your wife texts you to bring milk on the way home) - Ban WORK communication (eg. My colleague don't understand recent commit I've made) So the web really isn't explaining how things enforced or what is being done. I do know of some industries where you put your personal phone when entering specific locations or having stickers on cameras) but here I didn't fully understood the scope.
- inemesitaffia 3mo agoYahoo messenger/BBM used to be popular when I was in banking and that's where banking was done. Then confirmed via email. Now the idea is all banking related stuff is done on approved devices and clients so you can deal with retention(more like deletion) and loss. And no personal chat clients too. If you're low enough on the pole, you don't even get to keep your personal devices with you.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- blitzar 3mo agoFinance - no personal devices in the office and no personal (or unauthorised) messaging apps on your work devices.
- wolvoleo 3mo agoI've seen this too in a meta moderation center. They were real sticklers for this. Even personal headphones were not allowed. I don't think this is legal in EU but for that kind of low-level work they tend to get away with that.
- nottorp 3mo agoOf course, the consequence is you end up communicating for work on something like Teams instead of an usable chat app.
- lossyalgo 3mo agoI refuse to install that malware on my phone. Upshot is that I don't get bothered by coworkers after hours.
- throwa356262 3mo agoLike zoom where you chat disappears when the meeting is closed? Or how about slack, that lives in an alternate reality where outlook calendar can be ignored?
- nottorp 3mo agoTeams will spam your outlook calendar :) Slack is actually the best I've used for actual work comms so far. But then I mean communication, not calendar spam.
- jeroenhd 3mo agoI'm living a glorious Outlook-free life at work. I'm glad that I don't need any of that crap. Maybe Slack is right to push people away from the Microsoft shitware that businesses stick to.
- wolvoleo 3mo agoTrue, Teams is a horrible tool. I wish we had something better but our company insists on keeping everything within the MS ecosystem.
- basisword 3mo agoI'm surprised any company allows work to be done over employees personal apps/devices/numbers. If a colleague/boss contacted me about work via my personal number they'd be quickly told to never do it again.
- ghaff 3mo agoIt's not at all uncommon. I didn't have a usable work phone number for years given that, even when I technically had a desk, I was never there. I always used my personal phone and, for that matter, laptop for that matter.
- Roark66 3mo agoWhat? 75% people use personal chats for work? I've never seen this in my over 20 years working in the UK, Poland and few other countries. Personal messaging apps were always banned everywhere I worked.
- KptMarchewa 3mo agoI have not for couple of years, but before covid I've worked in a well-known Polish company that was trying to force everyone to use at first HipChat, then some awful OSS chat. My team set up discord then.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- s_dev 3mo agoI would imagine this is the exact problem they are trying to stop: Civil servant accused of leaking Govt information to foreign intelligence service in Ireland https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2026/0530/1576047-yevgen-mckeeffe-court/ https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2026/0530/1576047-yevgen-mcke...
- wolvoleo 3mo agoOur company does the same. We are not allowed to use whatsapp for any work-related stuff. This is for several reasons, mostly security and data-loss prevention. On Teams we can monitor with purview what happens with personal (customer!) data, which is mandatory here in europe under GDPR. We must take steps to ensure it is only processed by entities we have a data processing agreement with. But we don't block people from using it for personal purposes of course. Whatsapp groups between colleagues to coordinate lunch options and nights out are super commonplace and perfectly fine. Even on work hardware (on android on the personal side of the phone, on iOS we just block copy/paste into whatsapp from corporate app). I even saw our CISO using whatsapp web on his corp laptop. It's fine as long as it's not used for actual work. Here in EU it is mandatory to permit some level of personal activity even on work devices.