this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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There's going to be an article one of these days in Business Insider or something saying "employees increasingly establishing secret outside-of-the-company communication channels and sharing trade secrets over them." And then the companies are going to get all pissy about "muh trade secritssssss" and issue nagging emails to the whole company not to set up Discords to evade their employee monitoring solution that they pay a gorillion dollars a year for. And because it was the CEO's idea, he can't just back down and admit it was wrong. He has to keep doubling down.
That's a really interesting point. By forcing more surveillance of casual chat, they're also risking confidential information being discussed on outside channels.
I would assume that for any reasonably large business, with a competant legal team, there is a certain amount of this considered to be an acceptable risk.
Employees discussing shit on your systems? You're (most likely) legally responsible for it if things come to a court room. Employees discussing shit through their own side channels? You've got plausible deniability of awareness and a strong legal argument for it being outside of your responsibilty due to having no control of it.
This is literally a strategy for some shady and unscrupulous companies to attempt to avoid liability. Conduct any questionable communication over official "unofficial" third party channels.
Like they've not made a WhatsApp group already lmao
This is already a thing. I'm part of a 25k person Discord server for Amazon/AWS employees both current and former. We often discussed a ton about the company's inner workings, navigating the toxic AF environment, and helping people find other jobs. Nothing ever trade secret level, but that Discord would give any competitor a massive leg up in direct competition with Amazon.
former blue badge myself (port99, kitty corner from blackfoot), any idea if or how I could get in? not that I'm exactly burning with desire for it, but could be neat to see how things have changed since I left right when covid hit
I don't think so because it requires you to provide proof you work there actively, and those who leave are assigned alumni and grandfathered in. It's mainly just lots of PIP and toxicity that is discussed, and memeing about how dog shit things are.
word. not missing much then, haha
And then comes the attempts at criminilization
It's in the business's best interest that any questionable discussions happen outside of their systems.
The simultaneous chances of data exfiltration are a considered risk, and there are already legal actions available to the business for that aspect of it. This is effectively a solved problem.