Hey every1,
Recently my employer replaced Microsoft lync with Spark.
Spark saves conversation history. Where is saved this history on local PCs or at server? How safe is it? can employer track employees activities on Spark or see what employees texting with each other? what actually encrypt button does?
Thanx.
Spark is saving its history locally in your profile in plain text. Though employer can also store history in various ways on the server too and it can be readable. You can’t find out other than asking him and trusting his answer. It is as safe as your PC or server are safe.
Encrypt button (OTR - Off The Record) creates a session encrypted by a certificate generated between two clients. Messages in such session can’t be recorded on the server. Well, they can, but it will be a garbled nonsense. But they would still be recorded in plain text on your PC. So, to be 100% safe you should probably disable saving chat history locally in Spark Also, there are some clumsiness to OTR usage. Both parties have to first open a chat window and only then proceed to OTR session. Though next time you open a window OTR will be enabled again automatically (unless you change the setting to disable it when chat windows is closed). Anyway, often you may face issues when you receive a garbled text because OTR session was closed on your end and not on the other, or sometimes no messages come through until both disable and re-enable OTR.