The Sleakening
Privacy is an illusion.
Earlier this week, Slack announced it had discovered a security breach in its browser application that could have led to hackers stealing full usernames and passwords, granting them access to all their logs. Your logs. My logs. Not Travis Kalanick’s logs, unfortunately, because Uber left Slack last year. A very kind Swedish man named Frans Rosén alerted the company through their “bug bounty” system, for the price of $3,000 and my endless gratitude.
As one very astute media critic put it last year, “I walk around telling people I think privacy is an illusion, which is not to say I don’t think it’s a right.” We are only as safe as the sum of our social contracts. Slack has over four million daily users, a quarter and a million of those are paying subscribers. Imagine if all those logs became available to the public by way of some major hack? First everyone would search their own name, which is only natural. Then the corporate espionage would begin. Just kidding, but journalists would have a heyday sniffing out corporate malfeasance, and someone would be made to look bad, but then also someone would be made to look human, and reasonable people would start to feel icky about it.
Let’s try a parable. You work at a very big and well-regarded company, so big it is part of a larger conglomerate, which, as big companies do, experiences the occasional office relocation. There is much talk of fancy architecture and floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, but there is also the very dire matter of a new trend in office socioarchitecture: the open-plan office. Specifically, the idea of having many fewer (or even zero) offices with doors. “But how will they know who the important people are who make the most money!” cry out the office-havers. “How else can I unhook my bra straps while I eat lunch without anyone around me seeing?” And probably someone will reply, “We have provided you with a common area between the ping-pong table and the espresso machine.”
But there really is an advantage to the space with walls around it, beyond just the removal of audible and visible distraction. It is the psychological aspect to the office as a room for your mind to think or behave differently because you think no one can see you. (My favorite proof of this is the clear door. I can still see your screen and also your finger up your nose.) Behind a closed, opaque door, you can whisper and put heads together and conduct illicit affairs and plan coups that will never happen. You can gripe and commiserate, but you can also laugh and let go. All kinds of good and bad things happen in offices. Indeed, one of the better arguments in favor of preserving the office is, “But what about all the difficult conversations I need to have as part of my job?”
But whether or not there are walls, workers will still find a way to carve out that little office of the mind. In the age of open-plan offices we’ve built ourselves little spaces of our own where we can be in constant communication, silent but for the tap-tap of our greasy fingers. The most notable thing about Twitter and Facebook and Office Messenger and HipChat and Slack and Instagram and on and on and on is that they all have private messaging capabilities within them. Closets within rooms where two or a few people go to have sensitive or even just very specific conversations, without the specter of an audience. It’s worth something, that feature, but it costs something too.
Humans are constantly looking for little cubbies to put their secrets in. You should just accept right now that the Slack leak can and probably will happen, but you shouldn’t let that change the way you use it. Even if you take things to Signal, you will never achieve true vacuum-sealed privacy, because privacy is a system and not a space. It’s a contract, not a stipulation. What’s it going to look like when, inevitably, someone comes along and turns the whole thing upside down and shakes all the gossip out? It’s going to look like every one of us has a time when we needed to have a backchannel to say something we know not everyone wanted to or should hear. There but for the grace of God type I.