Recording every call, message (and in my office - thing you said at your desk) is mostly used for conflict resolution - when counterparties disagree you go to the tapes and see what was said. From there my word is my bond, it is done.
Personally I think it's much cleaner to keep work stuff on your work device(s) and personal stuff on personal devices. The only place that gets sticky is where companies don't provide the device but want you to have work information on it (e.g. mobile phones)
And if you don't want to use BYOD we are required to supply a phone if we require employees to use one (which we do, for MFA).
I've been in a lawsuit with Oracle (as engineer, not direct). And their discovery hit EVERYTHING.
If I used work devices for personal messages, my personal messages would absolutely been in scope.
Or if I used personal devices for work, my personal devices are now in scope. Hell NO!
My work laptop is on my personal network. Its also on its own vlan and can only talk to the imternet, and not fellow devices. And I can attest to that as much if I'm ever called in for a discovery hearing.
Some of our antimalware like SentinelOne actually does this by default though we have switched it off for privacy reasons (EU)
When we get requests to "legal hold" an account for discovery, this is always coming from the US.
In Europe, unless it's a criminal investigation, which this wouldn't be, there is no way a lawsuit would touch your personal devices if you didn't agree (and mostly also nobody would care I think).
And GDPR explicitly forbids personal items to be released during discovery even to jurisdictions that require that.
You could maybe make the case for a federated - email like - messaging service for inter company / party communications. Matrix basically ...
Features: easy to switch devices, including PC. File transfers. Video sharing. Audio-to-text conversion out of the box.
It's just an article from a company about their industry, companies do that all the time for brand recognition, building trust (showing expertise in their domain), and educating potential customers about why they might need this sort of product (lead generation).
Civil servant accused of leaking Govt information to foreign intelligence service in Ireland
https://www.rte.ie/news/courts/2026/0530/1576047-yevgen-mcke...
This is for several reasons, mostly security and data-loss prevention. On Teams we can monitor with purview what happens with personal (customer!) data, which is mandatory here in europe under GDPR. We must take steps to ensure it is only processed by entities we have a data processing agreement with.
But we don't block people from using it for personal purposes of course. Whatsapp groups between colleagues to coordinate lunch options and nights out are super commonplace and perfectly fine. Even on work hardware (on android on the personal side of the phone, on iOS we just block copy/paste into whatsapp from corporate app).
I even saw our CISO using whatsapp web on his corp laptop. It's fine as long as it's not used for actual work. Here in EU it is mandatory to permit some level of personal activity even on work devices.
Or how about slack, that lives in an alternate reality where outlook calendar can be ignored?
Slack is actually the best I've used for actual work comms so far. But then I mean communication, not calendar spam.
What does that even mean? I doubt you can forbid the usage of personal messaging apps except in very exceptional cases (like a court room).
On the other hand: Using personal messaging apps for work related information is a no-go anyway because of confidentiality agreements basically everyone signs.
- Ban ANY use of your personal chats / device at work (eg. your wife texts you to bring milk on the way home)
- Ban WORK communication (eg. My colleague don't understand recent commit I've made)
So the web really isn't explaining how things enforced or what is being done. I do know of some industries where you put your personal phone when entering specific locations or having stickers on cameras) but here I didn't fully understood the scope.
Now the idea is all banking related stuff is done on approved devices and clients so you can deal with retention(more like deletion) and loss.
And no personal chat clients too. If you're low enough on the pole, you don't even get to keep your personal devices with you.
You can forbid your employees to use non official apps to send work related messages for privacy, compliance, security and other reasons.
I don't think this is legal in EU but for that kind of low-level work they tend to get away with that.
I see no EU regulation that would give employees a right to play with their phone on the job.
However this company was super abusive anyway. Putting pressure on people to work nights and weekends etc. It was a subcontractor.
In the end meta replaced them all by AI moderation and fired thousands of people in one go.
Personal messaging apps were always banned everywhere I worked.
“Take” sounds too threatening.
Shakespeare’s Othello (c. 1603‑1604)
Iago says to Othello: “Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, / … O, thou wilt choose thy poison, and be damned!”
The delivery issues can be solved by introducing a standardized address system for Spain but that would take decades to roll out. Some people I know don’t even have an address, they just use the land registry number. Or just the name of their village + surnames, which is typically good enough for the standard mail (but not good enough for DHL/UPS/DPD packages, their drivers want your location via WhatsApp)