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Slack AI Training with Customer Data

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Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#331

To add some nuance to this conversation, what they are using this for is Channel recommendations, Search results, Autocomplete, and Emoji suggestion and the model(s) they train are specific to your workspace (not shared between workspaces). All of which seem like they could be handled fairly privately using some sort of vector (embeddings) search. I am not defending Slack, and I can think of number of cases where tra…

> the model(s) they train are specific to your workspace (not shared between workspaces)

That's incorrect -- they're stating that they use your "messages, content, and files" to train "global models" that are used across workspaces.

They're also stating that they ensure no private information can leak from workspace to workspace in this way. It's up to you if you're comfortable with that.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#332
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats baffling to me is why companies think that when they slap AI on the press release, their customers will suddenly be perfectly fine with them scraping and monetizing all of their data on an industrial scale, without even asking for permission. In a paid service. Where the service is private communication.

Most people don't care, paid service or not. People are already used to companies stealing and selling their data up and down. Yes, this is absolutely crazy. But was anything substantial done against it before? No, hardly anyone was raising awareness against it. Now we keep reaping what we were sawing. The world keeps sinking deeper and deeper into digital fascism.

Companies do care: Why would you take additional risk of data leakage for free? In the best case scenario nothing happens but you also don't get anything out of it, in the worst case scenario extremely sensitive data from private chats get exposed and hits your company hard.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#333
post #115

The gold rush for data is wild. Private companies selling us out. - Slack - Discord - Reddit - Stackoverflow Let’s just hope this data gold rush dies out faster than the web3 craze before OpenAI reaches critical mass and gets access to government server farms. Alphabet boys have server farms of domestic and foreign surveillance and intelligence. Exabytes of data [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Cente…

I mean slack is sold off. Founders made money. For all intents and purposes it's dead software.

The data it has is incredibly valuable if they build their own product or sell it off. You essentially have org charts of entire companies and people asking for things and getting responses and working back and forth together long term.

In terms of building agents for doing real work this could be more valuable than things like Reddit.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#334
post #6

I'm confused about this statement: "When developing AI/ML models or otherwise analyzing Customer Data, Slack can’t access the underlying content. We have various technical measures preventing this from occurring" "Can't" is a strong word. I'm curious how an AI model could access data, but Slack, Inc itself couldn't. I suspect they mean "doesn't" instead of "can't", unless I'm missing something.

As an engineer who has worked on systems that handle sensitive data, it seems straightforwardly to me to be a statement about:

1. ACLs

2. The systems that provision those ACLs

3. The policies that determine the rules those systems follow.

In other words, the model training batch job might run as a system user that has access to data annotated as 'interactions' (at timestamp T1 user U1 joined channel C1, at timestamp T2 user U2 ran a query that got 137 results), but no access to data annotated as 'content', like (certainly) message text or (probably) the text of users' queries. An RPC from the training job attempting to retrieve such content would be denied, just the same as if somebody tried to access someone else's DMs without being logged in as them.

As a general rule in a big company, you the engineer or product manager don't get to decide what the ACLs will look like no matter how much you might feel like it. You request access for your batch job from some kind of system that provisions it. In turn the humans who decide how that system work obey the policies set out by the company.

It's not unlike a bank teller who handles your account number. You generally trust them not to transfer your money to their personal account on the sly while they're tapping away at the terminal--not necessarily because they're law abiding citizens who want to keep their job, but because the bank doesn't make it possible and/or would find out. (A mom and pop bank might not be able to make the same guarantee, but Bank of America does.) [*]

In the same vein, this is a statement that their system doesn't make it possible for some Slack PM to jack their team's OKRs by secretly training on customer data that other teams don't use, just because that particular PM felt like ignoring the policy.

[*] Not a perfect analogy, because a bank teller is like a Slack customer service agent who might, presumably after asking for your consent, be able to access messages on your behalf. But in practice I doubt there's a way for an employee to use their personal, probably very time-limited access to funnel that data to a model training job. And at a certain level of maturity a company (hopefully) also no longer makes it possible for a human employee to train a model in a random notebook using whatever personal data access they have been granted and then deploy that same model to prod. Startups might work that way, though.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#336
post #89
post #61

> We offer Customers a choice around these practices. If you want to exclude your Customer Data from helping train Slack global models, you can opt out. If you opt out, Customer Data on your workspace will only be used to improve the experience on your own workspace and you will still enjoy all of the benefits of our globally trained AI/ML models without contributing to the underlying models. Why would anyone not opt…

> Why would anyone not opt-out? Because you might actually want to have the best possible global models ? Think of "not opting out" as "helping them build a better product". You are already paying for that product, if there is anything you can do, for free and without any additional time investment on your side that makes their next release better, why not do it ? You gain a better product for the same price, they ge…

> Of course, if you value the privacy of these data a lot, and if you believe that by allowing them to train on them it is actually going to risk exposing private info, the story changes. But then you have an option to say stop. It's up to you to measure how much you value "getting a better product" vs "estimated risk of exposing some information considered private". Some will err on one side, some on the other.

The problem with this reasoning, at least from what I am understanding is that you don't really know when/where the training of you data crosses the line into information you don't want to share until it's too late. It's also a slippery slope.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is extremely clear from what I’m saying, it’s completely anecdotal.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#338
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't care, paid service or not. People are already used to companies stealing and selling their data up and down. Yes, this is absolutely crazy. But was anything substantial done against it before? No, hardly anyone was raising awareness against it. Now we keep reaping what we were sawing. The world keeps sinking deeper and deeper into digital fascism.

Companies do care: Why would you take additional risk of data leakage for free? In the best case scenario nothing happens but you also don't get anything out of it, in the worst case scenario extremely sensitive data from private chats get exposed and hits your company hard.

Companies are comprised of people. Some people in some enterprises care. I'd wager that in any company beyond a tiny upstart you'll have people all over the hierarchy that dont care. And some of them will be responsible for toggling that setting... Or not, because they just can't be arsed to with how little they care about the chat histories of the people they'll likely never even going to interact with being used to train some AI.

Re: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

#339
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when a few paragraphs below they say: > If you want to exclude your Customer Data from helping train Slack global models, you can opt out. So Customer Data is not used to train models "used broadly across all of our customers [in such a way that ...]", but... it is used to help train global models. Uh.

Why are these kinda things opt-out? And need to be discovered.. We're literally discussing switching to Teams at my company (1500 employees)

Ugh Teams = Microsoft. They are the worst when it comes to data privacy. I'm not sure how that is even a choice.
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