Bear in mind my opinion is coming from the US ITOps perspective, outside of this my opinion may not travel as far pun intended re:the rest of the world.
There are a lot of out of touch concerns here in regards to privacy. I think this basically shows the diff between INDependent devs and employEE devs.
At any point in time a company who owns and pays for all IT related accounts and services can look, monitor, export disable, enable, delete, log or secure their systems as they need to either by compliance requirements, legal, policy or for any business or nonbusiness reason at anytime.
At the least you do not have a right to privacy to at the best limited privacy when communicating on a company provided communications platform.
Most companies worth their salt have this written down in their company handbook or manual etc. Most companies also have reasonable "you may use company systems for limited private exchanges"
This is even more true when the company has government or gov facing clients or does business in certain market sectors like Finance.
It is good to see the new kid on the block (Slack) is growing up and getting more focused on its core business clients: companies/b2b.
The same goes for company provided laptops, equipment.
I think it is also super important above all that the vast majority of people and companies enter into these things in good faith and reasonableness. We just do not live in a world where the honor system can be the only safeguard for these things. And of course with all things businessey -- the more money is riding on top of something -- the more important it is to be wise in regards to risk in and out of business matters.
There are a lot of out of touch concerns here in regards to privacy. I think this basically shows the diff between INDependent devs and employEE devs.
At any point in time a company who owns and pays for all IT related accounts and services can look, monitor, export disable, enable, delete, log or secure their systems as they need to either by compliance requirements, legal, policy or for any business or nonbusiness reason at anytime.
At the least you do not have a right to privacy to at the best limited privacy when communicating on a company provided communications platform.
Most companies worth their salt have this written down in their company handbook or manual etc. Most companies also have reasonable "you may use company systems for limited private exchanges"
This is even more true when the company has government or gov facing clients or does business in certain market sectors like Finance.
It is good to see the new kid on the block (Slack) is growing up and getting more focused on its core business clients: companies/b2b.
The same goes for company provided laptops, equipment.
I think it is also super important above all that the vast majority of people and companies enter into these things in good faith and reasonableness. We just do not live in a world where the honor system can be the only safeguard for these things. And of course with all things businessey -- the more money is riding on top of something -- the more important it is to be wise in regards to risk in and out of business matters.