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What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

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Re: What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

#112
post #2

I've never understood why Slack can't add support for E2E encryption. I'm 100% positive they've got large clients demanding this functionality.

They could, but I don't think it would really add much benefit. One of the main features of Slack vs IRC is that Slack has persistent and consistent chat history. If you look at apps like Signal, when you log on from a new device your history isn't available, because of the end to end encryption used to store the messages. To view the history you would have to be able to decrypt it, but that means there has to be som…

Slack offers the ability to encrypt messages with your own key, managed in your own AWS KMS account, so chat history and search still work until revoked for a particular channel or time period :

https://slack.com/enterprise-key-management

Re: What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

#113
post #9

First thought: who the hell would be interested to read thousands of lines of discussions like how to name a field in REST response or notifications of someone making a build xD

Nobody, but it's not about that. It's about trade secrets, access keys for e.g. AWS, git; it's about private information that can be used for social engineering or extortion. If a malicious actor can take over someone's account they could do even more convincing social engineering and access confidential information. If you think "I have nothing to hide" you're lacking in imagination.

Note: Privacy is about consent, not about hiding.

Re: What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

#114
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A variation of this argument always seems to come up in discussions about privacy. Yes, 99.9% of what you do or say in your daily life is likely of no consequence. But every now and then you may do or say something that could be used against you, and someone who has many years worth of data collected on you can probably find quite a few such bits of info. Among all of your internet "transactions" probably less than 0…

^ This People rant about coworkers and managers, complain about their spouses, joke about doing something illegal/stupid, compare themselves (favorably or not!) against a competitor, and share the occasional off color story/picture with a friend. Should those things happen on corp systems/network? Most of them, no. Do they? Absolutely. When we do those things, we don't think about it because we all have the immediate…

> ^ This

No. Privacy is not about your right to hide. It is about another's access to info about you, i.e. consent.

"If you've got nothing to hide" is pure misdirection. It doesn't matter one bit why I won't allow you access to personal info.

I do not owe you an explanation - if you want my data, you owe me one.

Re: What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you hired a good lawyer and made them pay handsomely for this. They would have deserved it.

Oh yes, and they played the long game until it was economically self destructive for me to continue. Never forget the time advantage a corporation has over an individual. In the end I lost all my equity.

Sorry to hear this.

Re: What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

#116
I worked at a company that uses Slack as its main casual communication medium.

One day, I walked into a meeting to learn that I was being fired without warning, and would have absolutely no opportunity from that moment forward to log in to any of my business-related accounts.

That sudden unexpected contextual change really puts the lack of privacy control into perspective.

Suddenly, all the conversations that I had had with other coworkers were taken away from me, and made available to whoever was in charge of handling my old logins. Is that really acceptable?

I always make a point to remember the communication medium that I am using, and to filter myself respectively, but how many events like this exist that I have no control of? How can I predict the events that will put my privacy in jeopardy? What text exists that I would have liked to be more private?

Re: What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

#117

I worked at a company that uses Slack as its main casual communication medium. One day, I walked into a meeting to learn that I was being fired without warning, and would have absolutely no opportunity from that moment forward to log in to any of my business-related accounts. That sudden unexpected contextual change really puts the lack of privacy control into perspective. Suddenly, all the conversations that I had h…

I don't think the firing changed anything, though. You have to assume your employer had access to your chats already. And emails, etc. Your net privacy didn't change.

Re: What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

#118
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if all your search history were leaked? What if all your text messages were leaked? What if all your emails were leaked? But I can directly go into all those things and delete at least my copies of them. Even with as many problems as Google and Facebook have, it's relatively straightforward to see the entire history of what I have on their sites and delete it. > As usual, it's not that serious, and there isn't…

No, you absolutely can't delete your search history, which Google stores in perpetuity, and you can't delete the copies of your SMS messages that sit on some server somewhere, probably forever. All you can do is make it inaccessible in the app or web page you as the user can view it from.

There are two distinct threat levels:

1. the mostly anonymized logs that require a technically difficult crack and would impact many thousands (millions?) of people simultaneously.

2. activity that can be tied directly back to individuals by anyone with time on their hands.

You're absolutely right that there are servers maintaining logs and such, that aren't accessible, but they fall into #1. And category #1 can happen, the famous cheating website being cracked as a great example. But that was itself relatively exceptional since simply being a user was enough to end in divorce.

The Slack message history distinctly falls into #2. It's a far more immediate problem.

Re: What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you hired a good lawyer and made them pay handsomely for this. They would have deserved it.

Oh yes, and they played the long game until it was economically self destructive for me to continue. Never forget the time advantage a corporation has over an individual. In the end I lost all my equity.

What would have been the correct way to handle such a discovery in order to cover your own rear?

Re: What If All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked?

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just let each client index locally

So, is each web client going to download the full history so it can build an index? I like being able to login from anywhere, but building a local index could take some time, and I definitely don't want that to happen when I first open slack in the browser.

That's what local storage is for.
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