A former Twitter employee, Gary Rooney, won about $600,000 for unfair dismissal after Twitter assumed he resigned by not responding to Elon Musk’s “hardcore” work email.
The case highlighted the importance of clear communication between employers and employees, especially regarding significant changes in employment terms.
Rooney’s private Slack messages, where he discussed leaving, were used as evidence by Twitter, underscoring that internal communication on platforms like Slack is not always private and can be used in legal disputes.
Fucking good. I’ve had to fire people (up in Canada though) and it’d be fucking ridiculous to “Please opt in to not be fired” it violates so many fucking employment laws.
That’s why we don’t bother having employment laws. So much easier this way!
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internal communication on platforms like Slack is not always private
That’s common sense, frankly.
But people don’t understand it.
Hell, no email sent or received is yours and likely can never be truly deleted off your company’s exchsnge. Same with files etc.
It’s not common knowledge, let’s not pretend it is and educate people.
Most companies have a strict policy to delete everything off of exchange after a few months unless there is a reason to keep it longer. You can’t bring up in court anything that wan daleted before you looked.
I don’t think that’s true. We archive all email within the company as soon as it arrives. This is done to prevent an employee from deleting any evidence for many reasons that they may have. We are also on litigation hold which requires all data to be saved and since we can’t trust everyone to do this we are required to back up everything until we are told not to. We have used restored data many times for legal cases in the past.
Where I work there is a data retention policy, and emails and other forms of communication (internal emails and slack, but even customer calls, etc) are deleted after a set amount of time, which varies depending on the rationale for storing that data.
There’s many reasons to do this - limit disclosure issues in case of litigation, reduce storage costs, comply with PII rules around the world, etc. The guys in Legal have us file these loong ass forms about all this, including where the data is kept, security measures, etc etc etc.
I’m shocked this isn’t common practice everywhere.
There are two main types of data retention policy:
- Retain everything to protect the company when the staff do something dodgy.
- Delete everything to protect management when management do something dodgy.
It’s a little more nuanced than that, of course, but in broad strokes that’s how I’ve seen it play out. Does the company want to pin the blame on somebody or shrug and say “we have no idea how that can have happened, guess we need to forget about it.”
When I worked as a US FedGov contractor, I was greeted with a long warning banner every time I logged into my computer. The tl;dr version of it is “fuck your privacy”. Being that I was part of cybersecurity for the site I was working at, I was one of the people doing the fucking. While we didn’t read everything from everyone all the time, we were logging it and could pull it up, if we were performing an investigation. We also had some automated stuff scanning for patterns and keywords on a regular basis, which could trigger an investigation.
While I’m no longer in the FedGov space (thank the gods), I still assume that everything I do on my work system or with work accounts is being logged. Also, I’m still working in cybersecurity and am often still the one doing the privacy fucking. Yes, everything is being logged. We may not look at it today, we may not look at it tomorrow. But, when HR and Legal ask us about a user’s activity, we can usually be pretty detailed. Act accordingly.
My company is better than most I’ve worked for. They tell you, upfront, anything on their equipment can be monitored for any reason with no warning.
But then, as part of the HR and acceptable use policy, no one will monitor your activities without just cause and investigation. Meaning in practice, “We’re not going to look over your shoulder while you watch YouTube videos but if we notice you’re watching a lot of or you start visiting porn sites, we’re going to start monitoring you.”
Now all that said, I still assume that my company knows every key I type on their laptop.
Mines the same way. It’s actually kind of difficult to get approval to monitor someone. Has to be approved by two VPs.
american-based billionaire attempts to use american capitalist tactics against an employee who is not in america. fails spectacularly.
are workers rights communism now? /s
Worker’s rights? More like “Wokers rights,” amirite???
Maybe if you pulled yourselves up by your bootstraps, we could all live off our investment portfolios and the margaritas would just serve themselves.
Always have been.
Paywall?
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