
What Your Boss Could Learn by Reading the Whole Company’s Emails - rfreytag
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/the-secrets-in-your-inbox/565745/?single_page=true
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jacknews
"In an ideal world, employees would be honest with their bosses,"

Haha, this is a nice bit of rhetoric judo. I think the bigger issue is usually
bosses being honest with employees.

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rmetzler
Maybe managers could get the same benefit if they would encourage employees to
speak up and actually follow the advice some of them might have.

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lingzb
It seems like this article is advocating for Big Brother to watch you...

~~~
everdev
> When I asked Mirovic about privacy concerns, he said that KeenCorp does not
> collect, store, or report any information at the individual level. According
> to KeenCorp, all messages are “stripped and treated so that the privacy of
> individual employees is fully protected.”

They collect meta data, but it's still a group invasion of privacy.

Also, the article reads like a sales pitch for KeenCorp.

~~~
jedberg
> but it's still a group invasion of privacy.

You shouldn't expect any privacy regarding anything you do at or for work
(other than using the restroom). The email and chat servers are theirs, and
they have every right to read the emails. Good companies will at least tell
you when they're reading your email, but legally they don't even have to do
that.

~~~
UweSchmidt
A very concerning attitude, to assume people have no rights at a workplace.
Ironically and disappointingly this attitude seems prevalent among Americans.

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astura
I don't think you can quite equate "monitoring of company email usage" with
"no rights at a workplace;" also "stating a fact" is not the same as
"assuming," it's not even the same as "advocating for" or "liking."

I doubt there exists a company anywhere that's not monitoring email at least
for spam and viruses.

There's certain times where it's not only acceptable but actually required to
"violate employee's privacy" by searching their personal possessions - think
airline employees, prison employees, etc.

Most companies will have some sort of auditing software on their critical
servers to detect (and report) both unauthorized access but also unauthorized
activity. I seriously doubt this is illegal in Europe. It's very difficult to
take serious the position "my boss shouldn't know I logged into the production
server and downloaded the whole database because 'I have privacy.'"

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vmchale
> Invading privacy is good, but only when the more powerful do it to the less
> powerful.

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hellweaver666
I work for a big firm. Very little of our personal communication happens over
email these days. They would have to analyse chat logs instead to really
understand what is going on.

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JeanMarcS
If there’s not a Slack plugin yet, we can bet they’re working on it.

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czechdeveloper
Owner of Slack instance can request all data, including direct messages, as
far as I remember.

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Uw7yTcf36gTc
our company moved away from slack distinctly because it was too cumbersome for
them to look into a person's chat logs. IIRC they also notify the user when a
manager requested/looked at their logs. They moved to a local instance of
Mattermost for 'privacy' reasons, but it was the opposite of what you would
think. The privacy isn't of the user, but rather they wanted a lack of
privacy.

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gaius
Back in the ‘90’s we used to say the e in email is for “evidence”

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mirimir
Back in the day, I spent many days skimming email printouts, produced in
discovery, and organizing them for review. Defendants were obligated to
produce everything relevant, but not necessarily in any order. So basically,
they'd dump everything out, mix well, and then pack in boxes. Or at least,
that's how it seemed to some of us.

~~~
maxxxxx
I have heard that was a tactic banks used when they were investigated by
Congress after the financial crisis. "you want documents? No problem. Here are
several trucks loaded with printouts. Enjoy!".

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Soundest
>KeenCorp doesn’t read the emails, exactly—its software focuses on word
patterns and their context.

Well if that isn't the biggest pile of horse shit I've ever heard, I don't
know what is.

We don't read your e-mails, we just have a program that injests the contents
of your email and assign you an unexplainable number that might get you fired.
Oh, and we lied about reading your e-mails, this software totally does that.
Trust us!

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thisisit
This looks like a submarine article for Keencorp. The way it tries to build
suspense on Fastow's answer by taking a hard turn towards "textual analysis"
is a dead giveaway.

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chipuni
And nothing bad could POSSIBLY go wrong with this. </sarcasm>

