Live data from Hacker News

Slack AI Training with Customer Data

slack.com

261–270 of 426 posts

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#261
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're saying they won't train generative models that will literally regurgitate your text, my guess is classifiers are fair game in their interpretation

The OP privacy policy explicitly states that autocompletion algorithms are part of the scope. "Our algorithm that picks from potential suggestions is trained globally on previously suggested and accepted completions." And this can leak: for instance, typing "a good business partner for foobars is" might not send that text upstream per se, but would be consulting a local model whose training data would have contained…

> How can Slack guarantee that the model won't incorporate proprietary insights on sourcing the best foobar producers into its choice of the next token?

This is explained literally in the next sentence after the one you quoted: "We protect data privacy by using rules to score the similarity between the typed text and suggestion in various ways, including only using the numerical scores and counts of past interactions in the algorithm."

If all the global model sees is {similarity: 0.93, past_interactions: 6, recommendation_accepted: true} then there is no way to leak tokens, because not only are the tokens not part of the output, they're not even part of the input. But such a simple model could still be very useful for sorting the best autocomplete result to the top.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#262
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But you can opt out, right? So what’s the problem? This thinking is the problem. "Oh, we just added your entire private/privileged/NDA/corporate information to our training set without your consent. What's the problem?" Opt-out must be the default . Edit: By "Opt-out must be the default ." I mean: no one's data must be included until they explicitly give consent via an opt-in :)

Especially since once it has been trained, it is in the model, and I am not aware of any way anyone has discovered to later remove from the model single or selected training data points, except for re-training/re-learning the model. So basically the crime might already be done. But I also know that so many businesses are too sluggish to make a switch and employees incapable of understanding the risk. So unfortunately…

There's something called "machine unlearning" being worked on to address these issues.

This doesn't mean that I support Slack or any opt-in without consent training model. On the contrary. I don't have any OpenAI/Midjourney/etc. account, and don't plan to have one.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#263
post #239
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can opt out, right? So what’s the problem? Also, is Teams (and other messengers) any different?

> But you can opt out, right? So what’s the problem? This thinking is the problem. "Oh, we just added your entire private/privileged/NDA/corporate information to our training set without your consent. What's the problem?" Opt-out must be the default . Edit: By "Opt-out must be the default ." I mean: no one's data must be included until they explicitly give consent via an opt-in :)

Worth noting: This is a legal requirement in Europe

The GDPR mandates that consent is given affirmatively, with this kind of "oh we put it in the EULA nobody reads" being explicitly called out as non-compliant.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#264
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can opt out, right? So what’s the problem? Also, is Teams (and other messengers) any different?

You can opt-out by manually writing an email to them. The process matters.

They could make it even better, like requiring signed/certified physical mail /s. Or fax...

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distraction is not enforced. Learning to control your attention and how to help yourself do it is crucial whatever you do in whatever time and in whatever technological context or otherwise. It is the most long term valuable resource you have. I think we start to recognize this at larger scale. Slack easily saves a ton of time solving complex problems that require interaction and expertise of a lot of people, often u…

That’s a lot of words with no proof isn’t it, it’s just your theory. Until I see a well designed study on such things I struggle to believe the conjecture you make either way. It could be quite possible that you benefit from Slack and I don’t. Even receiving a message and not responding can be disruptive and on top I’d say being offline or ignoring messages is impossible in most companies.

Your idea also comes with no proof, just your personal experience.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#266
"We protect privacy while doing so by separating our model from Customer Data. We use external models (not trained on Slack messages) to evaluate topic similarity, outputting numerical scores. Our global model only makes recommendations based on these numerical scores and non-Customer Data."

I think this deserves more attention. For many tasks like contextual recommendations, you can get most of the way by using an off-the-shelf model, but then you get a floating-point output and need to translate it into a binary "show this to the user, yes or no?" decision. That could be a simple thresholding model "score > θ", but that single parameter still needs to be trained somehow.

I wonder how many trainable parameters people objecting to Slack's training policy would be willing to accept.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#267
While Slack emphasizes that customers own their data, the default of Customer Data being used to train AI/ML models (even if aggregated and disassociated) may not align with all customers' expectations of data ownership and control.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#268
post #227

Well I really hope this massively blows up in their face when all of Europe goes to work just about now, and then North America in 5-8 hours. Let's see if we have another Helldivers 2 event that makes them do a hard backpedal after losing thousands of large customers that will not under any circumstances take the chance. I have a friend with a law firm who just called me yesterday for advice as he's thinking about sw…

Personally, I rather liked self-hosted versions of these: Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/ Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/ Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/ Out of those, Mattermost was the easiest to setup (just need PostgreSQL and a web server, in addition to the main container), however not being able to easily permanently delete instead of just archiving workspaces was awkward. Nextcloud Talk w…

The problem is not technical, but social with these platforms.

i.e. How do you convince 40+ people from 5 countries to add yet another memory resident chat application and fragment their knowledge to another app/mental space?

This gets way harder as the community becomes more dynamic and temporary (i.e. high circulation like students). I gave the good fight last year with someone, and they just didn't flex a nanometer citing ergonomics of Slack is way better than alternatives, and didn't care about data mining (was a possibility back then) or keeping older messages at ransom.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#269
post #252

We really need to start using self-hosted solutions. Like matrix / element for team messaging. It's ok not wanting to run your own hardware at your own premises. But the solution is to run a solution that is end-to-end encrypted so that the hosting service cannot get at the data. cryptpad.fr is another great piece of software.

Zulip (https://zulip.com/) seems to be a great self-hosted python-based alternative to Slack/Teams.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#270
post #258

Is this new? As in, when was this policy developed?

From https://web.archive.org/web/20230101000000*/https://slack.co... it looks like they changed this sometime between 01-Apr-2023 and 18-Oct-2023

Then the date of 5th July 2023 looks likely as this is the date from which overall privacy policy is in effect: https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/privacy/privacy-policy

Interesting choice of date btw

Post reply on HN