[librarianscott]

So, now we can't use Teams to have the "water-cooler" moments that supervisors claim we need, but really we are having them on Signal or IOS and they just can't measure that. Organizations really, really, really hate transparency.

[throwaway0a5e]

They don't want you shooting the shit with company communications mediums because that has limited upside and much less limited potential downside.

Remember the famous "will the atom bomb test ignite the atmosphere" gentleman's bet those scientists had? Nobody actually thought it would but they discussed it semi-seriously. Today discussing some fanciful bad outcome like that (be it the mundane failure to deliver a product or something more interesting) is a liability when it's sitting in your company email servers. Even if that bad thing isn't what winds up happening or the people speculating aren't in a position to have accurate info the other side's lawyer or the regulator will try and construe it as proof that the company should have known ahead of time.

Or, more likely, say there's some sexual harassment or adultery kerfuffle between employees. It's way better for the company if none of that happened on company provided communications tools.

From the company's perspective it's avoidable risk to have work communication tools be used for informal BSing between employees. But they can't realistically prevent that so they introduce Skynet in order to make people watch their mouths and move those sensitive conversations elsewhere.

[mc4ndr3]

Having employees is a big potential liability. Having a corporation is a big potential liability. Drinking water is a big potential liability. I guess just don't do anything at all and then recalculate your risk metric.

[barrysteve]

The conversations will happen elsewhere and so will the relationships. Management is locking themselves out from the team leaders and suddenly those off site 'adult kerfuffles' are exactly the conversation you needed to hear to prevent exodus.

[ceeplusplus]

> The conversations will happen elsewhere

That's entirely intentional. You really don't want internal evidence of something that's going to be construed 10 years down the line as cancel-worthy, or worse, something that politicians/regulators are going to take out of context to attack you with.

[indymike]

Nah. People like to talk and not get fires for saying the wrong keyword.

[greyhair]

This made me laugh. Back in the late 1970s, there was suspicion that the Soviet Union a had completely tapped the AT&T phone network on the East coast. I cannot remember the author of the article, but they stated that every American having any telephone call with anyone on the East coast should toss in a number of different key words to overwhelm the ability of the USSR to gather any useful intelligence, because they would be overwhelmed by data. Then they gave a list of keywords. I wish I had saved it. So my brother and I, when we called each other, would toss in the occasional 'enriched uranium' 'satellite imagery' 'battalion' 'missile test' 'weapons research' and other nonsense into our conversation.

I don't know what I found funnier, the idea that some poor fool at a Soviet embassy had to listen to our conversation because a key word hit caused the recording to be saved, or the idea that the author even proposed that the idea would work.