Workplace communications platform Slack clarified how it uses customer data this month after social media users alleged it had an unclear policy.
Slack is a popular cloud-based software owned by American tech company Salesforce.
Its use increased during the COVID-19 pandemic as many people began working remotely.
Criticism against Slack began this month when a The user posted his surprise. Regarding Slack's privacy policy, which states that “the system analyzes customer data submitted to Slack (such as messages, content, and files) as well as other information (including usage information),” non-creative artificial intelligence. (AI) and machine learning to develop.
The company responded on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) that the models were “not designed to learn, remember, or reproduce any part of customer data.” “.
The company also said the data was not being used to train third-party large language models (LLMs).
However, Slack uses machine learning for some features such as summarizing information from channels a user follows.
Slack responded to the criticism with a. Blog post published Earlier this month.
“We recently heard from some in the Slack community that our published privacy policies are not clear enough and may create misunderstandings about how we use customer data at Slack,” the company said. ” said the company.
“We value the feedback, and as we looked at the language on our website, we realized they were right. We could have done a better job of explaining our approach, especially the difference. About how data is used in traditional machine learning (ML) models and generative AI.
Contacted by Euronews Next, the company gave a few examples of user data that could be used, such as the timestamp of the last message sent in a channel, the number of interactions between two users, and overlaps between channel names. Number of Leaping Words. Relevance to the user
A spokesperson added that while the guidelines remain unchanged, “the wording of the privacy principles has been updated” to clarify practices and policies.
Concerns about artificial intelligence and privacy
In the blog post, the company added that Slack's “traditional ML models use de-identified, aggregated data and do not access message content in DMs, private channels or public channels”.
The company also clarified that it is possible for an IT administrator to opt out of using your data by sending an email to customer service using a specific subject line.
This opt-in-by-default approach is one of the aspects of their policy that has been criticized.
While AI can automate tasks and increase efficiency, data privacy concerns are growing, especially when it comes to large language models.
Some tech companies, e.g Google or Amazonhas reportedly warned its employees not to enter confidential company information into generative AI tools, for example.