You're being disingenuous; it's the status quo because having the ability to monitor user communications is the default and inherent legal and technical nature of conveying communications over company owned infrastructure.

If you don't want to "be an asshole", set a clear company policy and move on.

Having been in the position of needing to access historical e-mail records while investigating CFO malfeasance and fraud, I'd say its downright irresponsible to not have the ability and policy necessary to monitor and review communications in extenuating circumstances.

You're looking at it from the perspective of malfeasance/fraud. The other poster is looking at it from teamwork/management.

They're not being "disingenuous". Ironically, speaking of trust/management, criticizing people's personal motivations like that is precisely one thing I'm taught not to do, for effective, healthy teamwork. (Whereas, if I must investigate antagonistically, like if a boss is harassing employees, I must assume the possibility.)

No, I'm looking at it from the perspective of simple rationality: SaaS does not mystically change the technical and legal nature of administrative access to communications over company controlled infrastructure.

As for criticizing motivations, disingenuity was the more polite assumption compared to the alternative: that he is ignorant of the legal, technical, and historical context to the degree that he actually believes HipChat's changes are unique or novel or questionable in any way.

Entities in a technologically privileged position are limited only by policy. The fact that he accepts that truth simply by relying on SaaS demonstrates the significant incongruity of logic at question here.

It's hilarious that you're implying it's hard to understand that the guy with the server password has can read everything. I mean, really?

The entire point of my protest to this change is specifically to stop either myself, or any member of management team from having a "technologically privilege position".

Your arguments about SaaS are irrelevant and juvenile. Just cause Atlasssian, or any SaaS provider, has access doesn't mean I, or my management team, should.

Saying "well we run our email server in house so we just solve this problem with a policy" is fine.

So you're OK with SaaS being protected by policy, but not the behavior of your own company's executive staff and delegated administrators?

Hardly seems irrelevant to me, and the free pass you give to SaaS is nonsensical and hypocritical.

You're either being purposeful dense or you have an agenda.

Whereas you appear to be simply dense given your inability to see the hilarious hypocrisy of surrendering the privacy of yourself and others to SaaS vendor policies while calling them to task for giving you the equivalent privilege of policy choice.