Since the Covid pandemic left so many of us working from home, professional messaging services and video conference apps have become hugely popular - but are they as private as you think they are?
One woman has discovered that there's actually a way to see everything your co-workers have said about you on Slack, and there's just one step you have to do before you can snoop on their conversations and work out exactly what they've been saying.
The woman, named Dero, said she was stunned to find that some of the channels created in the corporate messaging app were available to her entire company, and began doing some digging to find out what was discussed in the channels.
Dero - who didn't name the company she works for - uploaded a video on her @dandydemon TikTok account and said all you have to do is search your name in the bar at the top of the app.
She explained: "I have a pro tip that won't apply to most of you. Most of you will get nothing from this. But for the small handful of people that do, it will be very juicy.
"If you work for a moderately sized company - like a midsize to a large-sized company - and you use Slack, go ahead and search your name on Slack, because you will be surprised at the channels that are public that are talking about you, that you can read.
"I searched my name on Slack once at a company I was working for. It was a remote company, I had spoken at an all-hands meeting and afterwards, I got the compulsion to search my name. Oh, man.
"I saw notes from when I was interviewing, I saw a group chat that was talking about me. In that group chat I became a running joke, apparently. I was name-dropped many many times in that same group chat.
"So it may be valuable to look that up."
In the caption of the video, Dero asked others to reply to the clip with their findings from searching their own name in Slack, and admitted that while her search didn't bring up anything "too terrible", she was shocked to see the contents of the group chat.
She wrote: "If you do this and anything comes up, please stitch. Thankfully, it wasn't anything too terrible but I had never directly spoken to anyone in that group chat so it was quite the shocker."
And in a follow-up video, the woman said she found a chat where a supervisor and her staff were talking about her social life outside work.
News of the hack left commenters split over whether they wanted to see the truth in their group chats or not, with some saying they couldn't wait to have a look, and others saying they'd rather not know.
One person said: "I think I'm going to leave that one left unsearched. Makes me anxious even thinking about it."
While another added: "I'm so disappointed that everything I saw was just people addressing me in channels."
And a third wrote: "I'm a little scared to know. I don’t think I can handle that kind of information."
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