
Ask HN: Who, if anyone, owns the chat conversations? - vsiden
This is mostly about digital ethics.<p>I&#x27;m working on a service that allows users to make their own copy of chat conversations (from Slack, Telegram, HipChat, etc.) The conversations are those which the users are participating in and have a rightful access to.<p>However, sometimes when users do use the service, and their team admins become aware of that fact, the admins treat such a copying as a &quot;situation&quot;, as a full-fledged data breach, and trying to mitigate &quot;the problem&quot;. Though what is being archived is exactly the same data that the user can see via chat&#x27;s native clients. All this looks like those DRMs when you can read the book on your PC, but can&#x27;t copy a quote: look, but don&#x27;t touch. And I&#x27;m surely not happy with my service being treated as some shady hacker&#x27;s tool.<p>Do the users have some kind of moral right to download their conversations, especially if those conversations are going to disappear otherwise? To what extent? As there are other people&#x27; messages in the talks, making them public is obviously not the best idea.
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kohanz
IANAL, but when you say "team admins", do you mean their teams in the
workplace? If so, then I would assume that it is all property of the company,
in the same vein that work e-mails, documents, and source code generally is. I
imagine it is mentioned in the small-print of their employment contract or IP
agreement. If the conversations are being had during working hours, with
company tools, then wouldn't the company "own" those conversations?

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vsiden
I can see your point in cases where there _is_ a contract or an IP agreement
or a TOS. How about less formal teams like open source communities, online
courses, clubs, etc.? There is no employers who legally owns the
conversations, just an admin who usurped rights to control them.

Case in point: many online courses use team chat services like Slack for
informal communication and socializing between students, to act as virtual
campuses. One wouldn't expect private conversations between students to be
moderated by the faculty. :)

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andreicon
Dunno about Slack, Telegram, etc but we could take Facebook as an example:

Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook

from [https://www.facebook.com/terms](https://www.facebook.com/terms)

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jtfairbank
Absolutely. Especially since this is a service. Sure, employees could copy the
chat locally, but by using this service they end up sending the data offsite.
Certainly sounds like a security breach to me.

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vsiden
I agree that this _is_ a security breach if there's a legal agreement (a
contract or TOS), and in this case this is certainly not a question of ethics.

But in my case, this is happening with informal communities.

And btw, in case of Slack and HipChat, the data isn't "on-site" to begin with:
it's already on someone else's server :)

Also I want to point out that there's reason why users want to have their own
copy of the conversation history. Most admins don't care about preserving
history, especially if this means any hassle. Slack, for example, keeps just
10K recent messages for free teams, and having full history requires paying
for Slack. If they can't pay or won't pay, the users are out in the cold. What
else can the poor sods do?

