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by plexicle 2258 days ago
With the Vault I can pretty much see and do anything. I can set up hidden forwards and even look at private Hangouts chats between people. I've had to use the Vault before to go into a 1 on 1 Hangouts Chat and delete a message from one of the parties.
1 comments
cglace 2258 days ago
Why did you need to delete the message?
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masonhensley 2258 days ago
Imaging Bob from accounting pasted a customer's SSN into a chat thread, group or 1:1... there countless things that shouldn't be posted in chat messages to live for eternity.

Some companies build it into their systems to automatically catch and mask that data, sometimes someone has to rollup their sleeves and do it manually.

I'd wager that 95%+ of orgs have tons of sensitive customer data scattered into chat messages in Slack, Teams, Hangouts, etc that would horrify most of us here.

Check out this: - https://cloud.google.com/dlp - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY3PjFpI3rE

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plexicle 2258 days ago
You pretty much nailed it. My CEO revealed something he wasn't supposed to. Asked my help in removing his own message at his own request. I'm the only one comfortable with this kind of manipulation (I'm CTO here) and I'm happy that there's an audit trail of it as well to keep my position honest too.
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rikroots 2258 days ago
This. One of my less enjoyable jobs, as an admin, would be going into the GSuite jungle to track down and delete emails and messages containing data that clients had sent to us, or one colleague had shared with another, which included personal information that we were not supposed to be storing or processing because GDPR. Or tracking down a former colleague's 1-2-1 email exchanges with a client which included a work spec, or agreement for a change request, which the client later denied ever agreeing to because they didn't want to pay the bill.

My least enjoyable job would be going into the admin to recover emails "deleted" by disgruntled employees who got wind that they were about to be let go. Why they tried to delete their emails - I'll never know. They should've realised that Google hates deleting anything from their clouds.

One of my happiest days at that job was the day I got told I didn't have to be a GSuite admin anymore and could go do some proper coding work instead.

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fragmede 2258 days ago
Not OP but if party A is harassing party B (read: "sending unsolicited dick pics"), I could imagine circumstances under which the sysadmin deletes messages that party B has received. (After HR and lawyers all around have been looped in by all parties, and copies of the messages have been forwards to the lawyers.

Also consider that the first amendment isn't absolute and there is certain material that is highly unsavory, eg child pornography, that party B doesn't even want the potential of possessing.

There are certainly nefarious usages for that level of access as well, but I can imagine legitimate usage exists as well.

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