Is Slack really safe?
The associate director of research of The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the world’s most powerful internet privacy watchdog groups, has written an op-ed in the New York Times warning people against the use of Slack, the work chat app.
The op-ed describes one of the major concerns about Slack being its retention of all platform messages, by default “for as long as the workspace exists.” This particularly affects free users as they can only delete the most recent 10,000 messages from the platform, while the rest are saved on the servers.
"It is possible for Slack to minimize that risk. Or it would be, if Slack gave all its users the ability to decide which information Slack should keep and which information it should delete. Right now, Slack stores everything you do on its platform by default — your username and password, every message you've sent, every lunch you've planned and every confidential decision you've made.”Gennie Gebhart, EFF's associate director of research
Paid members do have more control over their data, which goes to explain why that version is not on Microsoft’s restricted list.
Since going public in June, Slack has received much criticism from the tech industry. First EY consultancy partnered with Wire instead of Slack, citing data privacy issues; then Microsoft banned the app, and now the op-ed by EFF.
Will Slack’s current evaluation of $18 billion decline in light of these issues?
