Guide to Slack import and export tools • Hacker News Board

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#421

Post by thefifthsetpin » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

jimktrains2 wrote: post #383

thefifthsetpin wrote: post #362

Yesterday, 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 th…

Wait 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…

It'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.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#422

Post by larrywright » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:47 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.

Communication over an employer-provided tool is not private communication.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#423

Post by pyjammas » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

pyjammas wrote: post #381

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…

While I sympathize with that concern, I do really believe that actively preventing employees from employing natural means of 'private' conversation is squarely in the 'panopticon' sphere of employment. I find it difficult enough that people can be 'owned' for full work weeks as far as their physical presence, but I suppose I'm pragmatic enough to accept that this is the status quo. But the thought that they are activ…

I can't seem to edit my comment, so I'll comment on my comment instead:

To put this in a broader perspective, because I'm tired of the comment-sniping that doesn't seem to lead anywhere:

I find myself already a bit uneasy with the whole idea that an individual can write away their freedom to spend their daylight hours tethered to an employer to the point where their every (productive, sunlit) hour needs to be accounted for.

At the same time I can understand that this is how things are, and we are trying to be human within that sphere, and perhaps for many this is not so bad as long as they can live in a microcosm of society within this world. That includes gossip, complaining, semi-secret conversation, and even romance (while that's often not smart).

I'd really prefer to engage with those who employ and get to dictate the behavior of said employees, instead of comment-sniping where we never bridge that 'gap' between me, a self-employed, individual (because I reject all that), and someone who actively is 'in charge' of people who submit to it.

I do realize that my wording in itself is not neutral, but I hope acknowledging that helps bridge that gap a bit at least. And I have counted those 'in charge' as friends in the past, plus I know I'm not a typical 'person', so I'm open to learning to understand this whole thing.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#424

Post by wrs » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

hjnilsson wrote: post #220

alexandercrohde wrote: post #113

Jesus, 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…

How 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…

It 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.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#425

Post by thefifthsetpin » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

jimktrains2 wrote: post #383

thefifthsetpin wrote: post #362

Yesterday, 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 th…

Wait 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…

"Wait a month" if you do that, then slack just cost you thousands of dollars. How mad I'd be at slack would be proportional to how may thousands of dollars they just cost me.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#426

Post by wrs » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:53 PM UTC

Spoom wrote: post #345

keeler wrote: post #217

Use slack-cleaner[1] to nuke messages you've sent. You need to generate a legacy token[2]. [1] https://github.com/kfei/slack-cleaner [2] https://api.slack.com/custom-integrations/legacy-tokens

I 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?

For compliance exports at least, preserving deletes and edits is an option you can set.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#427

Post by dalbasal » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

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…

One might argue that this is exactly the reason why slack should not have made this decision.

Inevitably, some communications channels are audit-able and some are not. Modern employees (being modern people) use a lot of channels. They call eachother, SMS, Whatsapp, Slack, email ...sometimes people even talk. Companies have only partial control.

Anyway, harassment or other misbehavior can happen on any of these. In some cases (like your intern case) companies have to audit, if they can.

Can Audit = Must Audit

If slack gives employers the option to read messages, they've given employers the responsibility to do it.

It's not cut and dry. You could argue that companies won't/can't use slack unless they can read messages. This is doubtless true in some cases and I imagine slack has it's eye on these cases right now. But, I think it's hard-ish to argue the magnitude is all that big today.

Companies did use slack before this feature existed, including yours.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#428

Post by wrs » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

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…

You didn't have compliance exports turned on already?

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#429

Post by jimktrains2 » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

thefifthsetpin wrote: post #421

jimktrains2 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait 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…

It'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 ne…

> It's like facebook in that the employees had a guarantee of privacy (insofar as most private communication is private;

Nope. You could be compelled to show your DMs on a work system.

There is no such thing as privacy on a work system.

Re: Guide to Slack import and export tools

#430

Post by gumby » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

enzo1982 wrote: post #243

Jenssen1234 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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.

The 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-m...

Wherever 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).