I’m leaving my employer soon, and one of the things I wanted to do was to keep some of my old correspondence from Slack that was more personal in nature. I wrote a script (well, I prompted AI to write a script) that exported all my DMs to a JSON file. I then built a quick local RAG, ran through them all, and had a local model categorize what was “personal”. From there I had it spit out a list of conversation topics and people that I went through by hand. The ones I wanted to keep got exported into a clean JSON file that I then copied over to a personal device.
Honestly, I think even that is at least very close to the line of what’s acceptable. I did everything I could to protect the company’s interests, and am confident that even if they were fully aware they wouldn’t have an issue with it, but I’m not at all confident it would be defensible in court if it came to that. If I thought it would, I wouldn’t have done it.
I would never even consider uploading the output to a third party, much less everything.
Yup. I don't know of any U.S. state where this wouldn't be considered a proprietary and confidential information violation given the usual slate of NDA clauses.
Unless the individual is already actively seeking whistle-blower protections (and they better be extremely highly financially incriminating) there's no legal support here.
I'm willing to get behind many "wild" start-up ideas, but this business model is dead-on-delivery in the U.S.
This is almost surely in violation of a bunch of corporate policies... The whole point is that they don't want you having access to anything once access is cut.
Contacts might be fine, but I don't know of any company that would allow an employee to sync work email messages and attachments to an unsanctioned third party, let alone retain access after termination.
After going through two layoffs, I realized I had the same painful problem both times: I lost all my:
- contacts,
- personal messages,
- and important information that were tied to my company email.
None of these were business-related — they were personal, and yet I had no way to recover them once my access was removed.
Because of that, I decided to build a solution (for free) that lets people safely sync their accounts to a platform where messages, attachments, and contacts are backed up.
If they ever lose access to their original account, they can quickly and easily recover everything.
The most interesting feature is that, if you already lost something (by deleting in your end) but some friend of yours sync its account.. you'll recover it back
I’m currently looking for 5 users to test this POC (for freeeeeeee).
Would you be willing to test the platform for me and share your feedback? Specifically:
What you think overall
What worked well (and what didn’t)
What could be improved
Any issues or bugs you find
Your feedback would be incredibly valuable and would directly help me make the product better.
> After going through two layoffs, I realized I had the same painful problem both times: I lost all my: - contacts, - personal messages, - and important information that were tied to my company email.
> None of these were business-related — they were personal, and yet I had no way to recover them once my access was removed.
You are describing a problem in your ability to store your contacts, not any problem with retaining the emails themselves.
If I want to keep a contact, I send the information to my personal professional email. Done.
If I want to have a personal conversation, I intentionally shift it to my personal professional email - or at the very least, CC: or BCC: the same.
There's no need to violate security standards at my company, just to preserve the 0.01% of the information for myself.
Isn’t my employer going to see me logging in to some random service with my work account? Will the corporate Microsoft identity provider even have you in the allowlist?
Some more product focused “tough questions:”
Is this a problem you think is common?
Example A: I can just connect with everyone I know from work on LinkedIn
Example B: I avoid doing personal business on my work machine so when I am terminated I don’t lose anything
Example C: anything I know I want to keep long term I save in some way that the company can’t keep
Example D: I don’t actually want to engage in Example C because it violates company policy and nothing I do at work is worth getting sued over.
Another question I’ll put into a separate comment because it feels like a very separate question than my first set of concerns.
What you describe on this post seems like a much different tool than what I see when I go to your landing page and watch the demo.
The landing page and demo strongly imply a sort of contacts power user application. I could imagine a salesperson or similar persona going for that product.
But this HN post describes more/different features than that which go beyond contacts.
Who do you imagine fits your ideal customer profile?
My last concern is your demo video. 30 minutes is crazy. A demo video should have absolutely zero “Um”s and other time wasting hesitations in it. It takes a full 1:30 before you even get past the login page.
The demo feels more like a “how to” tutorial rather than a sales demo.
It should be more like, 10 seconds to introduce, then, bam, start showing me the most valuable thing right away.
Someone clicking on your video is your golden opportunity to get to showing the value as quickly as possible. If they click on it and hear someone talking slowly about some boring product manual-style walkthrough and see the 30 minute run time they are going to dip out.
I know that’s going to be tough with English being a secondary language but it needs to be done over and over with a script until it’s perfect.
I also don’t want to discourage anyone from bringing their real self to a demo, but from a practical standpoint Daniel is very hard to understand sometimes. His accent is very strong and I am unable to understand some of the words he’s saying. Rehearsing a concise script down to the exact word until it’s perfect is one option that I think will improve pronunciation.
Another solution to avoid removing him from the demo would be to burn in subtitles (not just YouTube optional subtitles, force subtitles by burning them in).
Or, you can jump on a freelance platform and hire a voice professional to read off the script.
Either way, use a good microphone in a good recording environment. We shouldn’t hear echo like I am hearing in the video. I should hear the full dynamic range of the person’s voice rather than feeling like I’m on a zoom call.
Thank you all for the feedback, mainly the legal ones. The problem here is not only related to the company emails, but, it also helps to other that have own domain emails but at some point, loses it (because some reason).
People still sync their email in Apple Mail or similar apps, but, after getting the phone stolen or some HD problem in the computer, everything is done!
The idea is not to offer legal problems but, data problems, but I totally understand your point.
While I was targeting a different purpose and solution, a personal solution, people thought on this as business solution.
I had important emails lost from different domains that I had in the past without managing the contacts or attachments properly.. data not related to the company, but, personal data.
For those ones that faces the same problem that this solution is for.
I'm working hard to avoid that. In order to be approved by Google, we must follow a lot of data security preventions.
But it's interesting how people are talking about security but they are or using AI, or using social networks but never complain about that. I'm not saying about you, but, few people that I asked for to test.
ehhthing|2 months ago
Giving third parties access to your business emails can't possibly have negative repercussions right!
Ancapistani|2 months ago
I’m leaving my employer soon, and one of the things I wanted to do was to keep some of my old correspondence from Slack that was more personal in nature. I wrote a script (well, I prompted AI to write a script) that exported all my DMs to a JSON file. I then built a quick local RAG, ran through them all, and had a local model categorize what was “personal”. From there I had it spit out a list of conversation topics and people that I went through by hand. The ones I wanted to keep got exported into a clean JSON file that I then copied over to a personal device.
Honestly, I think even that is at least very close to the line of what’s acceptable. I did everything I could to protect the company’s interests, and am confident that even if they were fully aware they wouldn’t have an issue with it, but I’m not at all confident it would be defensible in court if it came to that. If I thought it would, I wouldn’t have done it.
I would never even consider uploading the output to a third party, much less everything.
calmbonsai|2 months ago
Unless the individual is already actively seeking whistle-blower protections (and they better be extremely highly financially incriminating) there's no legal support here.
I'm willing to get behind many "wild" start-up ideas, but this business model is dead-on-delivery in the U.S.
krackers|2 months ago
Cayde-6|2 months ago
danvc|2 months ago
After going through two layoffs, I realized I had the same painful problem both times: I lost all my: - contacts, - personal messages, - and important information that were tied to my company email.
None of these were business-related — they were personal, and yet I had no way to recover them once my access was removed.
Because of that, I decided to build a solution (for free) that lets people safely sync their accounts to a platform where messages, attachments, and contacts are backed up.
If they ever lose access to their original account, they can quickly and easily recover everything.
The most interesting feature is that, if you already lost something (by deleting in your end) but some friend of yours sync its account.. you'll recover it back
I’m currently looking for 5 users to test this POC (for freeeeeeee).
Would you be willing to test the platform for me and share your feedback? Specifically:
What you think overall What worked well (and what didn’t) What could be improved Any issues or bugs you find Your feedback would be incredibly valuable and would directly help me make the product better.
Thank you so much in advance! https://app.trevally.io
IAmBroom|2 months ago
> None of these were business-related — they were personal, and yet I had no way to recover them once my access was removed.
You are describing a problem in your ability to store your contacts, not any problem with retaining the emails themselves.
If I want to keep a contact, I send the information to my personal professional email. Done.
If I want to have a personal conversation, I intentionally shift it to my personal professional email - or at the very least, CC: or BCC: the same.
There's no need to violate security standards at my company, just to preserve the 0.01% of the information for myself.
xnx|2 months ago
Those are not your contacts, messages, or information
dangus|2 months ago
Isn’t my employer going to see me logging in to some random service with my work account? Will the corporate Microsoft identity provider even have you in the allowlist?
Some more product focused “tough questions:”
Is this a problem you think is common?
Example A: I can just connect with everyone I know from work on LinkedIn
Example B: I avoid doing personal business on my work machine so when I am terminated I don’t lose anything
Example C: anything I know I want to keep long term I save in some way that the company can’t keep
Example D: I don’t actually want to engage in Example C because it violates company policy and nothing I do at work is worth getting sued over.
dangus|2 months ago
What you describe on this post seems like a much different tool than what I see when I go to your landing page and watch the demo.
The landing page and demo strongly imply a sort of contacts power user application. I could imagine a salesperson or similar persona going for that product.
But this HN post describes more/different features than that which go beyond contacts.
Who do you imagine fits your ideal customer profile?
My last concern is your demo video. 30 minutes is crazy. A demo video should have absolutely zero “Um”s and other time wasting hesitations in it. It takes a full 1:30 before you even get past the login page.
The demo feels more like a “how to” tutorial rather than a sales demo.
It should be more like, 10 seconds to introduce, then, bam, start showing me the most valuable thing right away.
Someone clicking on your video is your golden opportunity to get to showing the value as quickly as possible. If they click on it and hear someone talking slowly about some boring product manual-style walkthrough and see the 30 minute run time they are going to dip out.
I know that’s going to be tough with English being a secondary language but it needs to be done over and over with a script until it’s perfect.
I also don’t want to discourage anyone from bringing their real self to a demo, but from a practical standpoint Daniel is very hard to understand sometimes. His accent is very strong and I am unable to understand some of the words he’s saying. Rehearsing a concise script down to the exact word until it’s perfect is one option that I think will improve pronunciation.
Another solution to avoid removing him from the demo would be to burn in subtitles (not just YouTube optional subtitles, force subtitles by burning them in).
Or, you can jump on a freelance platform and hire a voice professional to read off the script.
Either way, use a good microphone in a good recording environment. We shouldn’t hear echo like I am hearing in the video. I should hear the full dynamic range of the person’s voice rather than feeling like I’m on a zoom call.
vorpalhex|2 months ago
danvc|2 months ago
People still sync their email in Apple Mail or similar apps, but, after getting the phone stolen or some HD problem in the computer, everything is done!
The idea is not to offer legal problems but, data problems, but I totally understand your point.
While I was targeting a different purpose and solution, a personal solution, people thought on this as business solution.
I had important emails lost from different domains that I had in the past without managing the contacts or attachments properly.. data not related to the company, but, personal data.
For those ones that faces the same problem that this solution is for.
toomuchtodo|2 months ago
danvc|2 months ago
But it's interesting how people are talking about security but they are or using AI, or using social networks but never complain about that. I'm not saying about you, but, few people that I asked for to test.