Stop your boss from reading your private Slack chats with Shhlack
Did you know that your boss can read your private Slack conversations? That’s right – every time you switch to a direct messaging session to avoid Slack’s public thread, you might think that you’re talking away from the indiscreet ears of your boss, the virtual equivalent of, a quick word in the stairwell.
However, this is not the case. The boss can enter and spy on your “private” conversations at any time. Fortunately, there is a way to solve this problem, using a tool called Shhlack.
Contents
Shhlack
Wait, can my boss read my private Slack conversations?
How to encrypt your Slack conversations
What’s the point?
Shhlack
Shhlack is a message encryption service for Slack. When you use it, you and your cohorts will be able to read the messages from each other, but when your boss will go into Big Brother mode and decide to stealthily look at everything you say behind his back, all that she will see is gibberish.
Wait, can my boss read my private Slack conversations?
Yep. We will probably. If your company pays the Slack Plus plan and it has enabled the “compliance reports” option, administrators can upload your message sessions and view them at will. To check if this is the case for your Slack, go to teamname.slack.com/account/team and take a look at the Conservation and exports tongue:
On this account, administrators can only export public channels.Photo: Worship of Mac
If compliance reports have been enabled, you will see it here. Administrators will be able to download a .zip file of all your conversations, public and private.
If Slack compliance reports have not yet been activated, you can continue to criticize your boss. And if these reports are activated in the future, you should receive a message from Slackbot, according to GizmodoFrom Melanie Ehrenkranz.
Does it sound scary? Then try it from the other angle. You are the boss, and you pay for an email platform for your employees to use for the job. As a paying customer, you should have access to everything that happens in this workspace, is not it? After all, if employees want to chat privately with each other, there are many options for encrypted group messaging, such as iMessage and WhatsApp.
How to encrypt your Slack conversations
If you are concerned that your boss is listening and has important information to share, you can use Shhlack to encrypt messages. This is not an addition for Slack. Instead, you use either a browser extension (for Google Chrome or Firefox), or a patch that works with the Slack application on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
To encrypt your messages, all parties must use a version of Shhlack. They must then generate and share an encryption key. Once everyone is up and running, they can send encrypted messages. It looks like this:
Shhlack allows you to send encrypted Slack messages.Photo: Shhlack
Anyone with the key that receives the message will see this:
A Shhlack message deciphered.Photo: Shhlack
And if your boss decides to spy, she will see this:
Without the key, the messages are unreadable.Photo: Shhlack
What’s the point?
From the point of view of the user, it works exactly like email encryption and is just as boring to set up. If you really have something so sensitive about talking about it, it should just be hidden from your Slack administrators, why do you even use Slack to do it? After all, if you have it set up correctly, you already had to exchange keys, which means that you must have an alternative communication method that you consider secure. This can be iMessage, or you may be able to meet in person. So just do it instead.
Also, just because your messages are encrypted, you are not off the hook. Even if she can not read the content, your boss can see that you are using encrypted messages in Slack. That alone might be enough to cause trouble.
Also, if you use a tool like this, be sure to check Shhlack itself completely. After all, what is the point of using encryption if you do not trust the tools? Fortunately, Shhlack is open source, so you can dig into the code. Not that you do it. But you can tell yourself that someone has probably watched, at least.
Maybe the real The purpose of this tutorial is to make you aware that your private conversations in Slack may not be as confidential as you think. Sponsor Ads:
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