You asked
Could you please provide the following information:
- Do you make use of any Instant Messaging clients/systems, such as group clients like Yammer, Slack, Whatsapp groups, Facebook or Twitter message groups or user-to-user Google Chat type services etc?
If yes, please provide a list with details of each with its use, membership (to the extent it is disclosable, such as categories) and service as well as any 'service tier' information held and cost where applicable. This would include personal chat groups used in a way that would bring them into scope of the Freedom of Information Act.
The following questions are conditional on the answer being yes:
For each of the above, are you the data controller? Is it a shared service (e.g. use of https://ukgovernmentdigital.slack.com/) or your own system?
Where one of the above is a Slack or similar 'cloud' chatroom with a unique URL, please provide this link.
Where one of the above has a specific membership criteria, please provide this.
For each of the above, how long is information retained for and in what form?
For each of the above, please provide copies of any relevant policies or procedures regarding records management, retention or FOI/EIR/DPA compliance.
We said
Thank you for your request. The following information covers corporate channels only and excludes any other external social media groups.
Do you make use of any instant messaging clients/systems, such as group clients like Yammer, Slack, Whatsapp groups, Facebook or Twitter message groups or user-to-user Google Chat type services etc?
Yes we use Yammer, Facebook, Twitter and Sametime Instant Messenger.
If yes, please provide a list with details of each.
We use the free/unsupported version provided by Yammer. This is essentially self administered and regulated by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) community. There are 2,637 members in the ONS/all company group and anyone with an ONS email account can join. In terms of chat groups there are over 200 groups with membership coverage up to 597. These cover various interest groups, projects and work areas and can be open or private. In the case of the latter, access would need to be granted by an administrator of the group. We ask that users abide by the social media policy and Civil Service Code.
We have corporate external Facebook and Twitter accounts with 12,000 and 248,000 followers respectively, all of who are self selected. There is no official archiving policy as the content remains on Facebook and Twitter indefinitely and is also held on the National Archive. Both are governed by our social media policy.
We utilise the Sametime Instant Messenger facility within Lotus Notes. This facility is available to all colleagues within ONS (over 4,000). We are the data controllers for this service, There is no specific retention period for the information. By default message (or chats) are not kept. Colleagues, can however decide their own preferences for how long data their messages are retained.