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.
Interesting that it seems that you're using proton mail. I confess that I wasn't aware about that platform till few days ago.. that's what I'm also willing to achieve.
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.
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.
danvc|2 months ago
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.