Slack, Teams, Google Chat: Is there any safe place to complain about work online?
Summary
No, deleting your incriminating chats won’t protect you.
Workers are getting too comfortable venting on their employers’ chat apps. We tend to forget that nothing we say there is private.
Disney last week said it was quitting Slack, after a hacker gained access to an executive’s account and leaked millions of intraoffice messages. They included computer code, details about unreleased projects—and photos of employees’ dogs.
It’s a good reminder that collaboration apps like Google Chat, Microsoft Teams and Slack are the opposite of Vegas: What happens there doesn’t necessarily stay there.
Your chat logs could be reviewed by IT admins, human-resources representatives, potentially even managers. And the AI that summarizes employee meetings and emails could also help management monitor the workforce. In regulated industries such as finance, companies are required to retain communication records, and even casual chats are subject to subpoena.
It’s OK to be social. You can share your puppy pics with colleagues on Slack. Your impressive GIFs and memes probably won’t get you in hot water, either. But don’t complain or type everything that comes to mind, says Lorna Hagen, co-founder of workplace consulting firm Win Consulting.
“It is not a marketplace for free expression," she says. “It is a tool used for work productivity."
Before venting to your work spouse on Slack, here’s what to consider.
No privacy
Employers are typically logging chats—including direct messages—whether deliberately or because it’s the default setting. If your company retains a backup for regulatory, legal or data-loss prevention reasons, even deleted conversations might live on in the servers, say workplace experts.
Same goes for edited messages: If you write something problematic then tweak it, you might not be in the clear.
On Slack, for instance, your company IT admin decides if edits and deletions will be kept along with all messages—and for how long. If your company doesn’t specify, Slack by default keeps messages indefinitely. “We do not, and should not, decide for our customers what data should be deleted and when," Slack said in a statement.
“Even if you delete it right after you type it in, it can go somewhere where it stays for a little while, or it can go somewhere where it stays for quite a long time," says Gartner analyst Adam Preset.
Just because a company saves messages doesn’t mean it will sift through them all to find your gripes, however.
The “vast majority" of companies aren’t actively monitoring individual employee conversations “unless there’s a sustained pattern of true malfeasance," says Brian Kropp, president of growth at World 50 Group, an executive-networking business. That could include things like sexual harassment or suspicion someone is leaking customer data.
And even if a manager is allowed to access private messages, it can be difficult.
Google’s Vault saves Google Workspace files for compliance purposes, but only certain people can access them. “It’s very controlled," says Andy Wen, senior director of security product management for Google Workspace. “Not just anyone can see your data."
AI everywhere
AI can supercharge employers’ ability to monitor workers, from what they do on their computers to the tone they use with customers.
That includes logging conversations in audio and video calls. Often, it’s clear that a call is being recorded and transcribed, but not always. AI tools can also “proactively and pre-emptively" examine content as it’s created to protect an organization from risk or monitor employee sentiment, says Gartner’s Preset.
Arizona-based startup AskRadar.ai sells Maxwell, which leverages ChatGPT and its own software to take the emotional temperature of a workforce in Slack channels—if we’re generally happy or hate our jobs. Maxwell anonymizes the data and only analyzes public channels, Chief Executive Nils Bunde says.
Still, if a company wants to know who made a specific comment, it’s probably an easy search, he says.
“We are about as close to anonymous as you can get," Bunde says. “Nothing is anonymous," he adds.
Safer spaces
It’s a little smarter to complain via encrypted apps such as Apple’s iMessage, Meta’s WhatsApp, and Signal. In most cases, anything logged or intercepted would be gibberish, and some have settings to automatically delete messages on a schedule.
These messages might still be recorded on company devices, if other monitoring software is in place. Also, be careful who you vent to: Anyone in the chat can always take a screenshot.
And these safer spaces aren’t safe if your industry’s regulations or your company’s legal situation prohibit them. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have punished—and fired—workers for talking on WhatsApp and other unapproved messaging apps. The Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department in January reminded companies being investigated for antitrust violations—including Google and Amazon—to preserve chat-app messages. In April, the FTC accused Amazon founder Jeff Bezos of using Signal to hide possible evidence during the government’s ongoing antitrust case.
The safest way to complain about work is live and in person, says Rita J. King, founder of workplace consulting firm Power Pairs. “Anything that you say in a digital format could easily come back to bite you," she says.
Hey, at least it gives us a reason to go into the office.
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Write to Shara Tibken at shara.tibken@wsj.com
