Private groups are the worst thing in a truly collaborative environment. Would be nice in Slack to have a Publish this whole freaking thread to a public channel button.
Private groups are the worst thing in a truly collaborative environment. Would be nice in Slack to have a Publish this whole freaking thread to a public channel button.
But who is allowed to press it? If anyone, then anyone can expose career ruining messages from someone else, even inadvertently.
Can’t anyone already do that with a screenshot or a log dump? I’m always assuming company provided comms platforms are fully readable by the admins
That's a good operating assumption, and I usually think this way too.
It turns out Slack actually requires legal process or consent of parties to provide private messages to admins: https://slack.com/help/articles/204897248-Guide-to-Slack-imp...
But of course yes, another party could simply take a screenshot
They certainly can on Business and Enterprise plans. There’s some lip service to following employee policy and applicable laws, but if the policy allows (most do), and you’re in the US, the admins can do it.
It is. Firm I worked at had AI summarized chats delivered to admins and upper level management.
If you talk shit about your superiors, it will get back to them. Same with "anonymous" surveys.
love how we have technology that would have made Beria nut in his pants, now available to every pointy-haired boss
i'm thinking of moving to a cabin in the woods outside Lincoln, Montana
If you wrote it on your company's slack space, it is not really private to the company. Everytime I have a "private" conversation in Slack I have the understanding that the information could be shared. Even now there is a share button not for the whole conversation but yes for individual messages
It's potentially open to the public as well, given the right legal action. The Enron email dump revealed secrets that presumably ended several marriages.
Well the Enron dump was in the early 2000s, a lot of that stuff (irrelevant to the litigation) would get sealed these days. There were things like social security #s and bank accounts in there.
Every thread participant should check [_] I agree before the thread is published.
An inappropriate message may not be about something unsavory but about something private. Information about a contract which is not yet public. A discussion of a candidate who is then hired, and reads it. Etc.
consent in a company managed chat app doesn’t exist
Who would put a career ruining message on slack or any other company platform/service?
Seemingly benign and/or entirely work-related messages can turn out to be career-ending when weaponized by the company.
Or a coworker with an ax to grind.
1. A workspace admin or 2. by permission of all on thread, or AI inspects contents and gates on 1 or 2 if anything sensitive. This isn't 1990, we can program stuff now.
The OPs comments weren’t just a hypothetical. We’ve already seen numerous instances where agents have leaked private data. Even GitHub’s own Copilot has been found guilty of these vulnerabilities.
I agree. We have a leadership channel at work for well, the leadership team. Those conversations are sensitive. Evaluations, hiring bands, salaries, future product planning, markets, funding, etc. Access to that channel is strictly controlled. I am not worried about anyone taking a screenshot. In the case of allowing an AI agent to participate in the channel, I would be worried about that AI using information from that channel to answer a question outside of that channel. Keeping the agents "learnings" clearly behind a "firewall" would be of great importance.
Beyond that, the team are free to have private conversations between themselves. This is NOT something we log. At the end of the day, hiring good people and trusting them is important. The logic of making sure the AI does not leak those conversations also applies.
It is a new world, re:AI. It has its uses and things are changing at a rapid pace. It is not clear to be the protections we have implemented in todays paradigms are well implemented yet in the new AI world.
> This isn't 1990, we can program stuff now.
What a curious thing to say. My impression has been, if you put the accomplishments of computer science prior to 1990 against those subsequent, the prior would be more impressive, perhaps by a lot.
I programmed back then too so cheekiness applied mostly to me.
The only actually interesting thing about this regarding "career ruining messages" is how easy accidental disclosure violations would become.
Your Slack admin can read all messages regardless of where it was posted via SIEM
That can already happen with screenshots
Publishing "career ruining " messages on a company managed chat app is probably a bad idea in general.
Pretty sure slack enterprise has this feature for turning private chats into public channels.
Edit: verified. You can do this but takes an extra step of converting to private channel first then swapping the channel mode.
Pretty sure slack enterprise has this feature for turning private chats into public channels.
Checked docks. You can convert any private chat into a private channel. Then swap the channel from private to public.
Lol. I'm a peasant.
I'm confused are against the idea of private groups at all or just that you can't change the visibility settings later on?
No, there's a place for private, but it should be rare and not default mode for all company business related comms.
The change is for when everyone realizes this is useful info, a decision was made, you want to share this more broadly. Very often imo.