Guide to Slack import and export tools • Hacker News Board

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#371

Post by petermcneeley » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

tvanantwerp wrote: post #261

petermcneeley wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as they can go through your chat history it seems very reasonable and is not simply a further entrenchment of the structure of power. Information is power: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tvanantwerp

Uh, ok? Never really posted on HN under the illusion it was private, so not sure what you're going for here...

I apologize if this seemed personal. I just think that information asymmetry is a type of power differential. HN does not have such a n asymmetry when it comes to chat history.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#372

Post by dralley » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

Vektorweg wrote: post #257

protomyth wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> abusing your privileged access to conversations intended to be private (however justified you may consider it to be) will just breed mistrust among employees Abusing your privileged access?!? You do realize some of us are required to access those communications for a variety of reasons especially because a threat is happening? Also, I don't get a choice when the lawyer shows up and says we need to look at X's accou…

threats are hardly a good reason for mass surveillance.

It's not mass surveillance. It's compliance with the rules governing preservation of records for legal discovery.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#373

Post by dsacco » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #289

dsacco wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The 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.

It 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.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#374

Post by sirmike_ » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

Bear 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.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#375

Post by aquadrop » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

mbritton72 wrote: post #278

Glad 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.

Your problem is with people, not slack, they can just go to skype or whatever tool they want.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#376

Post by efuquen » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #352

guitarbill wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ass-covering. It should've been obvious as soon as HR was mentioned that this isn't about helping employees, harassed or not.

Before this change, would the company have been liable for harassing DMs on Slack, an unaffiliated service where they previously were not able to read peoples DMs?

> an unaffiliated service

Unaffiliated? The company a customer that is paying Slack for a messaging service, that certainly isn't 'unaffiliated'.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#377

Post by deltaprotocol » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

Reading 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.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#378

Post by eveningcoffee » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

tedivm wrote: post #302

ravenstine wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That line or reasoning makes no sense. If that were true, then states like California couldn't make it illegal for companies to eavesdrop on its employees(e.g. recording audio, bugging offices). But allowing companies to read direct messages is very, very similar. Also, what's preventing a victim of harassment from handing over the offending messages? I don't see how this helps anyone.

Recording audio and bugging offices is a completely different matter than reading through already preserved text that exists on company infrastructure (email or slack conversations). The records already exist in the case we're talking about. Presumably the victim would share the harassing messages, but by being able to review the records directly the supervisors can gain more information such as whether the harasser…

>The records already exist in the case we're talking about.

Perhaps it is then illegal to save these messages?

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#379

Post by buttcoinslol » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

peterkelly wrote: post #194

tvanantwerp wrote: post #13

As 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 acc…

If two people want to have a private conversation, they'll just find another means by which to do it. In the long run, abusing your privileged access to conversations intended to be private (however justified you may consider it to be) will just breed mistrust among employees. I would quit a job that treated me as a child which must be supervised in such a manner.

>I would quit a job that treated me as a child which must be supervised in such a manner.

Did you miss the part where the interns were acting like children?

>A few years back, a group of interns started privately harassing other interns via Slack.

We're all proud of you for making this top comment thread about your own ethical stand, let's give peterkelly a big round of applause!!

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#380

Post by simonbw » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

ggregoire wrote: post #274

I'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..

I 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.