[underseacables]

I have no problem with this. I worked at a company about five years ago where employees used G chat to say some really nasty things about other employees. I only found out because one of them was using a temporary laptop that we had to do presentations, and I opened it up and G chat loaded and there was this disgusting talk about other employees trashing them, talking about the religion, all of this stuff. People vent, I get that, but letting employees gossip about one another on a work provided service undermines cohesion and the ability to get the job done. If you want to complain about your fellow coworkers, go to a bar, don’t do it on the company provided slack channel. It’s grossly unprofessional.

[paulryanrogers]

Certainly company tools are under company control. Yet in the age of the pandemic consider that the bar isn't an option. One could start a Signal conversation or group, but it's higher effort.

Of course there are some lines we shouldn't cross, even if just venting. Hopefully we can all learn to be more gracious and humble, while maintaining a healthy amount of candor.

[dehrmann]

If you're in California (Netflix is based there, so it's likely), you need both parties' consent to record a conversation in a setting you'd reasonably consider private. You're probably (I am not a lawyer) better off venting over Zoom because if your employer admits to recording the call without your knowledge, they could be in for a legal headache.

[Meph504]

When you are using work equipment, you should not, consider your communications private unless specifically indicated.

In a work environment your reasonable expectation is to your person, and personal belongings.

There has been exceptions in both directions but in general, this seems to be the agreed upon rules.

So if you want to vent, use your personal phone, on your service providers, using software not owned and managed by your employer.

[smitop]

Presumably most employment contracts/usage policies explicitly give consent to the employer to access any private data that is stored on their systems? That would seem like a reasonable thing for an employer to mandate.

[angry_octet]

It's a good reminder that 'conversations' on Slack/Teams etc are NOT conversations, they are posts on a company message board.

If you want an OTR conversation then do it in person (though they might record it on their phone or take a contemporaneous memo, a la Trump Whitehouse), or in Signals with expiring messages (though even then you might need to assume the other party is screen capping the messages).

So best of all is to assume your messages/chats will be leaked selectively. Avoid gossip and innuendo!

[traveler01]

Very true I've seen too many cases of these kind of things ruinning entirely the work environment. If people can't get along, the productivity will surely be low.