How Private Are Your Private Messages to Co-Workers?
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Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, September 27th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. The messages we send on workplace apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Google Chat can run the gamut from official business to personal private messages, maybe even complaints sent to coworkers.
We've gotten really casual on them. There are always channels for, you know, personal conversations. And we shouldn't necessarily be treating these as places where we can just say whatever we want. We all should remember that these are work products. They are designed to help us improve our productivity at work.
Our personal technology editor, Shara Tibkin, goes over what is and isn't safe to say on a work chat app. After the break.
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A leak of internal workplace messages at Disney has raised privacy questions about online communication at work. Wall Street Journal personal technology editor Shara Tibkin joins me. Shara, bring us up to speed. How did hackers get into Disney's Slack messaging app and what kind of data was stolen?
They were able to get access to one person's Slack. So that enabled them to see all of the channels and conversations that this person was involved in. This wasn't a hack of Slack itself, but it was more gaining access to this one person's profile. And what they were able to get was a lot of information going back at least five years. So it was things like computer code, unreleased project details. But then there were also photos of employees' dogs and other personal conversations, which a lot of us do in Slack, Teams, Google Chat, all of these different collaboration messaging software.
What does that say about the level of privacy workers often assume that workplace messaging apps like Slack provide?
It really shows how comfortable we've gotten with these. Most of us use them in some form to communicate. Some companies do all of their business on Slack, all of their communications on Slack. Others, maybe it's just checking in about one person or keeping track of one project or whatever it is. But we've gotten really casual on them. There are always channels for personal conversations. And we shouldn't necessarily be treating these as places where we can just say whatever we want. We all should remember that these are work products. They are designed to help us improve our productivity at work. And we just need to keep that in mind if we're planning to say anything personal that you really shouldn't be sharing with everyone you work with.
And even though the messages at Disney were hacked on a Slack account, we're not singling out Slack. There are other messaging apps that are used by companies, right?
Oh, definitely. Slack is one of them. Microsoft Teams is also extremely popular. Google Chat. This isn't just a consideration for Slack. This is also something for whatever messaging platform that your company uses.
So let's say somebody complains about work or their boss in a direct message to a coworker. Are you saying it might not be fully private?
It really kind of depends on what sort of company you're at, the sort of policies, what messaging app your company's using.
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