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.

Today when I opened Messenger Lite there was a message from Meta saying " your chats will be moving to Messenger" and that Messenger Lite will stop working on September 18. I actively switched from Messenger to Messenger Lite several years ago because the regular Messenger app was draining my battery. Are there any alternatives to Messenger Lite on Android? Perhaps even FOSS?Or will my only option be to move to the old Messenger app if I want to use Facebook messenger? I have some work related groups on Messenger that would be tough to move to another platform, so Please don't just say "use Signal" or something similar.

I use Slack, WhatsApp, Discord and Facebook's Messenger. On my computers, rather than installing dedicated apps, I've always just used these services' browser versions. It allows me to block ads with my browser's ad blocker and modify the UIs with other extensions that I use.

But in terms of privacy — and more specifically, in terms of what the service has access to outside of their own walled gardens — is there a difference between using these services through a browser or their dedicated apps? I use both Windows and Mac computers, if that makes a difference. My browser of choice is Firefox and I run the services in their own containers.

On my phone, I just use the provided apps and get notifications that way. I am well aware that most of these protocols are not great for privacy to begin with, but I'm not currently looking for other messaging systems.