The Slack controversy has opened a whole new can of worms
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.
I don’t really care. You can see their page for what models they’re using the data on - it’s search, emoji recommendations and that kind of thing. According to them, user data from a workspace doesn’t leave it.
Most importantly, though, slack isn’t a consumer company. If you use slack for your group chat, it’s explicitly not what it’s for. Their bread is buttered from B2B.
You can bully your users with bad data protection when it’s random joes, not when it’s Corporate Amazon. If you fuck up their data, they have the means and the lawyers to find out and sue you to oblivion.
Slack’s users are possibly the most equipped out of any company to defend themselves.
I use slack, for work, and whatever happens to that data is not my problem - it’s the people who’s job it is to administrate our slack instance.
Eh its my problem insofar that Slack fucking up means I'll be stuck with Teams.
And that's almost worse than anything Google has personally done to me.
My company went from Teams to Slack and now... back to Teams. It's not awful, but I did much much prefer the experience on Slack. Although I wonder if they had a heads-up about this because they wouldn't even let us port our DMs to Teams. They've been hem-hawing on anything AI lately. The lack of DM porting could just be because of laziness or limitations in the migration software they were using and not having any skills though, we never did get a clear answer despite several queries.
There's also Campfire although it's barebones and I can't personally vouch for it.
What's wrong with Teams? It seems much easier to navigate plus integration with other 365 apps is really nice.
I can only speak for myself, but using teams is consistently the most frustrating part of my day. Microsoft seems to have gone out of their way to make it the least reliable software they could. Excel still beats it for the unreliability with a moderate sheet open, but teams definitely does a good job being shitty. One of the most frequent issues is that it will log me out randomly. If I don’t happen to see the small red banner at the top of the teams window to log in again, I won’t get any messages until I finally see it. So its primary job is to get messages to people, and it fails at that. The rest of my issues are less consistent, so I can’t remember them right now, but I get a handful of weird one-off issues every week.
Last, what program are you talking about when you say “teams”? Just off the top of my head, there is teams business as the successor to lync and Skype business, teams for personal use, teams built in to windows 11, and the “new” teams. All of these programs have little or no relationship to each other, except some branding.
I've only used Microsoft Teams (don't know any other variation than that, maybe Business?) in a few jobs now and it does what it needs to. Having chats, group chats, sending a file, quick phone call. It's all in one place, and everyone is using it. It's much faster to just ping someone on Teams than it is to send an email and wait days for a response or try to catch them in the office (cause who's actually in the office anymore?)
A lot of times I can ping someone on teams and get a quick response and move on with my tasks rather than add it to the dozens of emails I'm waiting on responses to to do anything
My work involves working with a bunch of workplace chat and video clients like this, and occasionally we'll switch to using Teams for meetings for a few days instead of Zoom to help someone test something. It has very consistently been a worse and more confusing experience for us, with constant whining about Teams until the testing ends.
I've not got as much experience with the chatting features as a user (just that they do some annoying shit with emoji encoding on the backend that made my job harder for a little while). Maybe that's closer to parity with Slack than their video calls. But I'd rather do a Slack huddle than their video calls.
In addition to what others said, the UI for chat is atrocious and most people default to private group chats, which defeats half the purpose.
Performance is slow and laggy especially compared to Zoom's.
The only feature I've found it does better is the 'call me' joing of voice via phone.
It helps that my use of O365 is basically 0. LibreOffice is enough for the occasional spreadsheet or slideshow, and everything else is in VSCode or our wiki.
In addition to what everyone else is saying, I believe the cause of some listed issues (chat being far too slow, the interface taking too long to load, logouts without a useful notification) is due to bloat.
Teams is effectively an expansion of SharePoint. SharePoint, while useful in some ways, is a shining example of software that tries to do everything and none of it very well.
So Teams is effectively layering chat on top of SharePoint sites. It's trying to manage documents and lists and web viewers for all MS document types as you click through it.
Ditto what /u/vord said, and I would personally hate to have a Slack discussion potentially exposed where there's proprietary technical data, or we couldn't expurgate a customer's HIPAA-sensitive data because it was needed for troubleshooting and software engineering.
It's worth protesting because of the deceitful abuse of policy gaps.
Reading the article, it's clear the data intake was initiated with actively deceptive intent, in the hope that Slack AI's training on customer data would be accepted as a fait accompli. The article notes that the way it was done is illegal under the GDPR. You can bet that Slack's lawyers knew that, and green-lighted the data taking anyway.
I sure hope that is true and that it doesn't come back to haunt them. It's pretty sad that some AI cases open are outright lying and aren't having the book slammed on them as a result.
So as many have mentioned they are going to be fighting the entire EU on this, and I think you’re overestimating how much an entity like Amazon can do in these cases
Yep, I agree with this.
I work for a company which was acquired years ago by a fortune 500. Before the acquisition we used slack and it was very much an "engineering only" not very well formalised affair. But once acquired our parent corp did all the due diligence to cross the t and dot the i's because we talk trade secrets on there all day long. We now use slack officially across the org and the company knows fine well slack has all that information.
All I heard about this (prior to this thread) was our IT guy saying we're opting out. So I assume that's a thing. Our company is pretty protective of customer data (which funnily enough includes their Slack chats) but for that reason we also don't generally share it in our Slack chats.
I think that using user data is wrong, but I also agree that you shouldn't try to hold Slack (or any other company) to any higher standards than any other company.
Tech companies exist to turn users into money by any means legally allowed. Call the companies out if they step over the "legally" line. Call the lawmakers out if the companies are just doing something you consider unethical.
I disagree with the implication that you shouldn't call companies out for legal but unethical behaviour though. Sure, also campaign to make it illegal, but legislation and especially enforcement moves a lot slower than bad PR, so I'm ok with some media/customer pressure being applied to change things.
Didn't they cross the legal line in context of EU users considering there are privacy laws like GDPR to prevent this exact kind of situation?
There’s a more practical way to think about this. You can certainly hold companies to standards that have nothing to do with what’s legal, like “this game is fun” or “this app has a nice UI.” That is, you can complain if they change it for the worse, and if there are enough high-profile complaints, sometimes they listen. If not, you can decide to stop using that software anymore.
The legal standard matters for lawyers filing class-action lawsuits and for government prosecutors, but not for most of us. We just take our business elsewhere if we’re disappointed.
Totally agree with this. Maybe you have to use Slack for some reason, but don't be surprised if they do what companies are supposed to to: Turn a profit by any means they think they can get away with.
I’m fine with being upset at them and everyone else who does this and will gladly vote for candidates trying to put a stop to this nonsense.
It’ll probably come after someone clever figures out how to get a model to vomit out sensitive information from the training set (as has already happened but I bet we’re just seeing the tip of this iceberg)
Probably not much would happen, a slap on the wrist and some fines. I'm sure they're already feeding any private data they can get their hands on to their Meta AI. What would they care for laws that don't apply unless they're caught? After Facebook did experiments where they tried, and succeeded, to negatively manipulate people's emotions resulted in little backlash, when it should have sunk them for basically attacking users and possibly resulting in suicides, I feel like they can get away with anything.