Privacy in chat apps

Your team assistant answers in many chats at once. Maria asks it about a leave date in the private #hr channel. Lee asks about the deploy window in the public #eng channel. Ana, Ben, and Cy ask it to draft a reply in their group DM. Each of those chats has its own audience, and the chat app decides who is in it. Mobius follows that audience.

Who can see the conversation decides what the assistant may use and remember there. What you say to the assistant in a chat stays in that chat. Only public Slack channels add to what the assistant knows everywhere.

This page applies to Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Telegram. Each of those pages lists only what differs for its app.

DMs and shared chats

A DM is a one-to-one chat between you and the assistant. A shared chat is a channel or a group chat: any conversation with the assistant and more than one person.

A company account is an account your organization controls, such as the team's Gmail or the company Slack workspace. Your own accounts never work in a shared chat.

What the assistant remembers for a DM or a shared chat never appears on the assistant's Memory page, for anyone. Reading happens in the chat.

What counts as public

Only a Slack channel that Slack reports as public, and that is not shared with another organization, is public. Everything else is private: Slack private channels and group DMs, every Teams channel and group chat, and every Telegram group.

If Mobius can't confirm that a Slack channel is public, it treats the channel as private. When a public channel becomes private, Mobius notices within about five minutes.

Ask what the assistant remembers

Talk to the assistant in the chat:

• "What do you remember here?" lists the notes for this chat and the shared notes, and says which is which.
• "Forget the note about Dana's leave" removes that note from this chat.
• "Remember that we deploy on Tuesdays" saves a note for this chat only.

The assistant can't remove a shared note from a private chat or a DM. It says so, and you manage shared notes on the assistant's Memory page.

Save something for everyone

In a public Slack channel, a person whose chat account Mobius has matched to their Mobius account can say "remember for everyone: we deploy on Tuesdays". The note goes to the shared memory, and the assistant uses it in every chat, every DM, and the Mobius app. The same person can say "forget for everyone that we deploy on Tuesdays".

When anyone else asks, or the chat isn't a public channel, the note stays in this chat, and the assistant says so.

Note: Mobius doesn't match Slack accounts to Mobius members yet. Until it does, every note from Slack stays in its chat. To share something with everyone, share it from the Memory page.

Company accounts in a shared chat

In a shared chat, the assistant uses a company account only when the account's grant for that assistant has the audience Everyone on your team. You set that under Who can use its actions on the account. An account granted to Named people only, and anyone's own account, doesn't work in a shared chat, because the chat is not those people.

Warning: Everyone in your connected Slack workspace or Teams tenant who is in the chat can use the company accounts the assistant can use there. Before you give the assistant a company account, think about who is in the chats it answers in.

A Telegram group gets no company accounts at all. Mobius can't tell who in a Telegram group is from outside your organization, so the assistant uses only the Telegram bot there, to reply. That limits accounts, not knowledge: in a group, the assistant can still read the company's files and tables it has access to, and its shared memory. Only the people you listed can ask the assistant, but everyone in the group sees its answers.

Reading other Slack conversations

With the company Slack account, the assistant can read a channel's messages and a thread's replies. What it reads lands in the conversation it is working in, so the same rule applies:

• It can read a public Slack channel from anywhere.
• In a shared chat or a DM, it can read that chat itself and no other private conversation.
• In your private conversation with your assistant in Mobius, it can read a private channel, group DM, or DM that you are a member of. Mobius matches you to the active account in your company's Slack workspace that has your sign-in email.
• In a conversation your team can see, it reads public channels only.

When it lists Slack channels or looks one up, it shows only the private ones it could read there. It looks up a Slack file only when it could read a conversation the file is shared in. If you ask for anything else, it says why it can't.

What the assistant reads from a private Slack conversation stays in your private conversation, like anything else in it. It can go further only the way the rest of that conversation can:

• you share the conversation with your organization;
• you ask the assistant to save it to shared memory, or to a file or table your team can see;
• the conversation belongs to one of your routines, and the routine is shared, transferred, or handed to someone else when you leave the organization.

Mobius doesn't check those later steps against who is in the Slack conversation, so think about who will see it before you do any of them.

Files the assistant saves in a chat

Files the assistant saves while it works in a shared chat stay with that chat. They don't appear in anyone's files or in the company's files in Mobius, organization admins included. Later, in any thread of the same chat, the assistant can find and read them again. No other chat can.

If you ask the assistant to save a file into the company's files from a private chat, it refuses and says why. In a public Slack channel, it does so only for a person matched to a Mobius member, and that person holds the file.

In a DM, a file goes to your own files when Mobius knows who you are, as in Teams today. Otherwise it stays with the DM.

Routines started from a chat

A routine can start when a chat message arrives. What happens depends on the chat:

• A public Slack channel: the routine runs as it does for any event.
• A private shared chat: only a routine whose condition names that chat starts, for example meta.conversation_id == "C0123ABCD" (the chat's Slack, Teams, or Telegram ID). A routine that doesn't name the chat never sees its messages. The run belongs to the chat. It runs in the chat's own conversation and uses the chat's memory. Its result posts only in the chat and thread that started it. It uses only company accounts. It can read, remember things for the chat, and save new files in the chat. It can't use any other tool: it can't send email, write to a table, run commands, propose a routine, or ask someone outside the chat a question. The run doesn't appear in the routine's runs, threads, or counts for anyone, including the routine's owner, and nobody gets a notification about it. Only the reply in the chat shows that it ran.
• A DM: a DM never starts a routine.

Events from chats

Messages in DMs and private shared chats don't reach anything else in Mobius: an assistant waiting for an event, a session that subscribes to events, or the body of an integration event in Build > Integrations or the API. The event list still shows the provider, type, time, and status. Messages in public Slack channels work as before. See source events.

Everything else from a chat follows the same rule: Slack buttons, slash commands, edits, deletions, reactions, and the assistant's own replies; Telegram edits and button presses; Teams installs. Buttons that Mobius itself posts, such as an approval or an account request, go straight to Mobius and are not stored as events.

People from outside your organization

The assistant doesn't work in a conversation that includes people from outside your organization:

• a Slack Connect channel, or one that is about to be shared with another organization
• a message from a Slack guest or a Teams guest, in a shared chat or a DM

The assistant posts one notice and then stays quiet in that conversation for 24 hours:

I don't work in conversations that include people outside your organization.

After a guest posts, joins, reacts, or presses a button in a shared chat, the assistant stays quiet there, even after the guest leaves. Ask Mobius support to clear it.

If Mobius can't check right now, for example because Slack is slow or busy, the assistant posts a different notice instead:

I can't check who is in this chat right now. Try again in a minute.

One case still gets an answer: a channel that Mobius already confirmed is public, when only the check on the sender failed. That answer uses no company accounts, because the sender could be a guest. If Mobius can't confirm that the channel itself is public, the channel gets the notice.

Telegram has no guests that Mobius can see. That is why a Telegram group is never public, what is said there stays in the group, and the assistant uses no company accounts there. It can still read what it reads in any chat: the company's files and tables it has access to, and its shared memory. Everyone in the group sees its answers.

FAQ

Can an organization admin read our shared chats in Mobius? No. Nobody can open a shared chat's conversation in Mobius. Usage and billing still count the assistant's work there.

Why can't I open my Slack DM with the assistant in Mobius? Mobius doesn't yet know which Mobius member a Slack or Telegram account belongs to, so nobody can open those DMs in Mobius. Read them in the chat app.

Does a guest who never posts get noticed? Only if the guest does something the chat app tells Mobius about: joins the channel while the assistant is in it, reacts to a message, or presses a button. Any of those marks the chat, as a post does. A guest who only reads a channel sees the assistant's answers there, like anyone else in the channel.

What happens to a channel's notes when it changes between public and private? The channel's own notes stay with the channel. Shared notes saved while it was public stay shared.

Next

• Set up the chat app on the Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Telegram page.
• Decide who manages each account in Connect accounts.
• Learn how private and shared notes work in agent memory.