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Comment by yau8edq12i | Hacker News Reader

What? First, Europe isn't a single country and there are large difference between legal systems.

Second, what you said is just plain wrong in at least one. In France (which is known for strict worker protections) the employer can go through any employee's mailbox or files on their work computer/account provided 1. that the messages/files in question aren't clearly marked as personal 2. that the conditions for the access are laid down in advance with proper notice. When an employee is let go, they need to be given time to empty their mailboxes etc of private correspondence or files. https://www.cnil.fr/fr/lacces-la-messagerie-dun-salarie-en-s...

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I had some DM’s which were of personal nature that were rifled through after a contract ended. How do you "clearly mark a DM as personal"? It was creepy, and further illustrated that anything you say in Slack can and will be viewed by the whole company. If not literally, then that’s how you should treat it.

You might be right that it’s not illegal, but it would be nice to have those kinds of protections. Trying to talk to anyone at work in the WFH era is a field of landmines, because you never know at any given time whether what you say will make it back to the person you’re discussing. Discussions like that are a normal and healthy part of socializing with coworkers, and it happens at every company. Except in the WFH era everything you’ve typed is a permanent record, whereas previously you’d be able to say something to a coworker without worrying that someone else will someday hear it.

But, it’s a new era. It’s easy to adjust. Just don’t get personal at work. It sucks, but work is designed to suck, or else it wouldn’t be work.

> anything you say in Slack can and will be viewed by the whole company. If not literally, then that’s how you should treat it.

Anyone thought otherwise?

In private DMs?

In company Slack?

Private != personal. At least I never ever imagined one could even assume DMs on work IM are personal private conversations. They're organizationally grouped as chat between to accounts, as opposed to group chat, but they're at work, for work, using work-provided tools...

Or put another way: why would anyone consider work Slack to be different in this regard than company e-mail? Much like with e-mails, the difference between DMs and group chats is whether the number of participants is > 2.

I guess the cognitive dissonance is that I used to be able to say things to a coworker in-person which wasn’t recorded and tracked, using my voice. This was always a normal part of work, and I didn’t give it a second thought until it was gone. Nowadays it feels like someone is constantly standing over your shoulder whenever you’re at work, and there’s never a private moment. This is especially strange during holidays, since personal conversations tend to spontaneously happen around those times.

You’re right of course. I just wish we had something to fill the void that was left by in-person interactions vanishing. I think I’ll be doing WFH pretty much the rest of my life, and I absolutely hate going into an office in general, but there are definitely some aspects I miss. Being able to chat off the record with a coworker is one of them.

Call! Yes, most communication can be done with chats in slack or teams, but take the excuse to call and chit chat a bit before getting down to business.

Unless all calls are transcribed and recorded, it’s pretty “watercoolerish”.

At that point, the bigger risk is that someone repeats something to someone that you wish they hadn't. But I've had that happen with an in-person conversation.

That's funny, because as someone who has worked mostly remotely, I consider the recording of every chat a feature. For example, I have been able to use this to figure out why code I wrote a decade ago is the way it is.

Most large companies will tell you two contradictory things:

First of all, they'll tell you that even the most junior helpdesk workers can remote onto your machine, reset your password, disable your 2FA, and monitor all your web browsing and chat history.

Second of all, that this unannounced product, this not-yet-filed patent, this big planned layoff, this prospective hire background check result, these upcoming financial results, this employee's reason for needing medical leave, this pentest result document, and this forthcoming change to pricing are Strictly Confidential. You shouldn't discuss them even with your own boss, unless you've first confirmed they're on the need-to-know list, and that certainly doesn't include level 1 helpdesk workers.

Most large companies, to address this contradiction, will say access is possible but rarely used, tightly controlled and carefully audited.

It is still strange to me that:

1) people think that anything sent on an employer system isn’t visible to the employer

2) people send private DMs from work accounts

The way this was communicated to me in the past was "don't say/write anything using company resources that you don't want to see on the front of <insert major news publisher>". All communications on employer-operated platforms are subject to discovery.

Senior leaders tend to skirt this by using the telephone or video calls predominantly. However the infiltration of machine learning and AI means transcripts of calls, etc are now possible too.

In addition, the growing use of "disappearing" messages despite litigation holds has come up in more legal cases recently.

A video call on a company account isn't ironclad but, unless you're discussing something actually illegal, it's probably good enough for most purposes. Maybe not as good as personal cell phones or in-person, but a lot better than anything written--especially on company systems.

That seems like it would be a much larger constraint than you're making it out to be.

What the said boss did sounds to me like impersonation, which is not only illegal, but a crime. Accessing records kept on company assets is one thing, logging in to someone's account in a communication software is another.

> Europe isn't a single country

Correct, but it does have a single ECHR. Even though some countries still ignore them.

What ECHR principle are you referring to here?

I agree with you, Europe has different countries and some of them are not in E.U. so different rules may apply. However, since France is in E.U. what you describe should be illegal. The article you refer to is 15yrs old btw....

The "article" is published by the French data protection authority. They update them when regulations change. They didn't update this one. Make a deduction, now.

> However, since France is in E.U. what you describe should be illegal.

What's the regulation or directive you're talking about?

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