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.
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.
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.
I'm working on a challenging project where there's a delta between what the market and PM's are asking for, and what dev wants to commit to. I'm talking to both parties to try and build consensus.
In such situations I dont want either side to see the negotiations, reasoning and reconciliations. Its not that there are career limiting statements in these threads, it's just navigating politics and I dont want that content in the public square
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.
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.
Having every inconsequential discussion on public channels is what really lower the signal to noise ratio of messages on Slack nowadays. I am starting to revert back to email now because at least the signal to noise ratio there is much higher.
