[cj]

What makes this even more sad is the extreme difficulty you'll have if you attempt to remove your company data off of the Slack platform. (Disclaimer: I stopped using Slack 2 years ago)

Our company used Slack extensively for multiple years. A couple years ago, we decided to stop using Slack for official company communication. After switching to alternative communication tools, we tried to delete the data in our Slack account and found it to be nearly impossible.

I recall using 3rd party python scripts (opensource on Github) that took hours to run - the script used an API key to fetch and delete messages individually.

We also tried using Slack's Admin panel to delete messages. At the time, I believe it required clicking a checkbox next to every chat message we wanted to delete. Clearly not a realistic way to scrub an account.

The sad reality is that with many services like Slack, once a provider has your data, there's often no easy way to remove it. IMO, this is a major downfall of our reliance on modern SaaS services (companies have no incentive to prioritize features for deleting account data - the only users who would find those features useful are already churned customers).

[gtirloni]

I don't understand this. They say that if you delete your workspace, all messages are gone.

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204067366-Delete-a-...

[throwanem]

It says they're "irretrievable", which isn't necessarily the same thing. That you can't get that data back doesn't mean it's no longer stored by Slack in a way that a sufficiently severe compromise of their infrastructure might reveal.

[gtirloni]

I doubt they keep customer data after you're not a customer anymore. Sure, they could be lying but we don't have information pointing to that, do we?

They are subject (or have subjected themselves) to various security standards: https://slack.com/intl/en-ie/security

And their security whitepaper [0] mentions:

Customer data is removed immediately upon deletion by the end user or upon expiration of message retention as configured by the customer administrator

It would be a stretch to say a message is deleted permanently but a workspace is kept forever, for unknown reasons. Occam's razor and stuff.

0 - https://a.slack-edge.com/78b2/marketing/downloads/security/S...

[bmurphy1976]

It probably means the data is encrypted at rest and they discard the encryption key. Of course I doubt we'll ever know because they won't give us that level of detail unless they are compelled to.

[cj]

At the time, there were reasons we couldn't completely delete the workspace. I believe there was certain data we wanted retained, and other data we wanted removed.

[pingec]

Sounds like an opportunity for a third party tool!