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Comment by Cacti | Hacker News Reader

It is very odd. We've had corporate monitoring of practically all employee electronic activities for decades. It's enshrined in legislation and tested in case law. The capabilities are built into practically every major business software. There are whole industries built up around it. Yet suddenly everyone is losing their mind over some corporate IMs just because it's Slack?

I feel like I'm on Reddit, not a site ostensibly catering to _computer professionals and experts_.

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The difference is their privacy policy has been changed retroactively against the good faith their users had. That's the problem. Of course if it's corporate it's usually monitored, but when Slack championed the user and only catered to the company when forced (via compliance reports which told you they were enabled) and now suddenly switches to a model where past contracts are broken, people have a right to be upset.

I mean, it sounds more like people are upset because they are embarrassed how they acted in DMs, or said things they shouldn’t have about their colleagues, and now are worried someone will see that. It doesn’t sound accidental, but that they didn’t get an Export notice, so they thought they were free to talk shit and act however they wanted to. Presumably a lot of these individuals are at smaller companies where a “CIO” might be more inclined to go in and read everyone’s private drama.

I dunno, it’s hard for me to have much sympathy. It’s a rough lesson to learn if you are in your mid 20s and maybe didn’t know any better, but anyone who has been around for any length of time should know better than to put certain things in writing. That is, like, a life skill, not some Bay Area social contract.

Yeah, it kinda sucks that they changed the privacy policy, but if you had actually read it, you'd have seen the part that says that they can change it any time for any reason.

And also, all they've done is give the corporation the technical ability to do something they've always been able to do -- read your private chats. It's just that before they had to do more work to do it, but they've always had the right to do it, regardless of what Slack's privacy policy said.

I know in general there's the whole "the company pays for it, the company owns it, the company can audit it" corportesse oblige, enshrined in case-law yada yada, but one of the things I always liked about Slack was it seemed to have a bit of that old counter-culture sneer around "yeah, that may be true, but we code for the user anyway". This is very much an anti-user, pro-corporate maneuver, and I think it's a shock to many who took Slack's long-time messaging to the contrary at face-value.

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