So Slack has been in the news since last couple of days and after wondering what dastardly thing did they do this time to deserve the wrath of Internet Gods, I decided to Google and found that they used the folks' private chat data to train their AI models.

But when I went through the discussions, some folks don't think of this as a big deal at all, some are actually defending Slack. They say, "So what, others like Microsoft and Google and Apple do this all the time with your and my data?". Do you agree with this line of thinking?

At some point, I think this is going to be a privacy nightmare. Imagine Facebook doing something like this with WhatsApp chat data? I think there are some regulations in EU/US preventing Meta from combining the WhatsApp data with their other components but such regulations don't exist in all countries and nothing prevents Meta from exploiting data of users from those countries.

What do you think about this? I think Slack needs to be called out more, not less. And something needs to be done to prevent this situation from happening again.