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Comment by danwee | Hacker News Reader

So, hows does the "Right to deletion" actually works in this scenario?

I have worked N years for company X and I was registered in their Slack workspace. Now I don't work for company X anymore, could I request Slack to delete all my data related to company's X Slack workspace?

Would that be a matter between Slack and myself only? Or perhaps between company X and Slack only? (at the end of the day I wasn't a paying customer, company X was)

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In that case, Company X would be the Data Controller and the request should be made to them.

The request can also be sent to slack as data processor. Most people don't actually know who is controller or processor and thus a processor has to relay the request to the controller who has to decide if the request is legit.

I would guess that actually anything you produced on company Slack is intellectual product that was produced during course of employment and as thus owned by the company. So no you can't ask it to be deleted.

EDIT: Now that I think more of it. This leads to somewhat interesting question about secrecy of correspondence. That is are the private messages protected? But on other hand would information posted on public or invite only channels be owned by company?

Probably depends on jurisdiction even inside EU.

In EU private messages are protected, companies can't just read through your entire mailbox as you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Of course they can read it if they have a good reason: e.g. you're leaking information to the competitor, but you can't just read random emails between an employee and their spouse for no reason. (Article 8 ECHR).

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