Garret from HipChat here. The previous discussion on this topic made a lot of assumptions about this change, so I'd like to quote some additional detail from our help doc (http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098) before the same happens here;
In order for an organization to access 1-1 chats occurring
after May 27, 2014 or later, the organization will need to
make a request by emailing support@hipchat.com. As stated
in the HipChat-specific terms, the requesting entity must
have consent from their affected users in order to obtain
access to those users' 1-1 chat history. The typical way
that an entity would have the right to access employee
communications is through the entity's employee policy.
It is standard practice among businesses to state in their
policies that the employer has the right to access
communications occurring on workplace systems. You should
speak with your employer if you have questions about their
specific data access policies.
>The typical way that an entity would have the right to access employee communications is through the entity's employee policy.
It's nice of you to drop into this thread, but it's exactly as bad people assumed.
If I was an employer and I didn't cover this sort of breach of privacy in my employee policy, and someone at Atlassian bothered to ask (I'm sure that Atlassian invests in lawyers to vet each submitted request), I'd just add the language to the policy document and fire it off.
So what? If your company ever used Openfire/Spark or any sorts of private IM services they're able to view private messages. Some of you act like this is some mind blowing travesty. You should expect the possibility of your company monitoring their services and communications.
This was the reason my company moved to Slack. There's no way for our boss to turn off the ability to read our PMs, so there's no way for us to know he's not.
No one in the company wants this—we expect PMs to be private.
I was concerned too and sent an email to the HipChat team. They responded nearly immediately and updated the original HN post.
To be able to see "private" communications, the manager would have to send an email to hipchat to request certain access. See above for the exact terms.
