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Comment by yters | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how many hardware and software services are "in the cloud" now. For example Slack monitors the conversations of thousands of businesses, and there's no telling what they do with the data behind the scenes.

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People who are concerned about privacy should read the policies which are designed specifically for them.

https://slack.com/privacy-policy

Without being too cynical: There is what they say they do, and what they actually do.

I'm not picking on Slack specifically here, but this is just healthy skepticism when dealing with cloud services all in all.

All bets are off with governments involved. There are lots of compelling reasons for secretly disregarding the already set privacy policy. Including but not limited to patriotism, anti-terrorism, child abuse, human rights, crime or flat out regime criticism, political reasons such as opposition.

Pick your providers carefully. You trust them more than you think.

How do you know that they’re actually monitoring conversations? Is there nothing in the TOS saying that they won’t view your actual conversations?

Hopefully they are trustworthy, but there is no way to really certify they are not monitoring conversations. And even if the company as a whole does not, that does not negate the risk of the insider threat, which is the source of many of the huge data breaches these days. At least in the government classified systems have to go through a rigorous accreditation, regular audits, contain all sorts of logging, and there is some modicum of external oversight by congress. As consumers, we have zero visibility into Slack. I really don't understand why using Slack is not perceived as a risk.

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