[economicalidea]

You can’t get private Slack messages easily if you don’t have direct access to the account. There is an audit feature on the Enterprise version that allows it, and you can appeal to slack to open the messages due to a crime or similar - but AFAIK on the normal plans you are out of luck of you want to read private messages as workspace owner.

[adastra22]

Request access to former employee’s corporate email and reset the password.

[morkalork]

Hah, that would be the trick wouldn't it. My old manager used to get all of his former employees work emails forwarded to an account he had access to. Ostensibly it was a precaution against accidentally missing anything critical from a vendor or partner.

[sillysaurusx]

Yep. That’s how it happened for me.

[planede]

Ouch. My takeaway is that I should probably delete my slack account before leaving the company.

[exitb]

The takeaway is that no message on Slack should be considered private.

[bluescrn]

I'd extend that way beyond that, to anything done on a company system/network/device.

If you need privacy, use your personal phone (and don't connect it to the company wifi)

[wil421]

Why would anyone consider a company provided messaging service as private? Or even a company provided laptop, cellphone, etc.

[adastra22]

People have terrible opsec.

[TimTheTinker]

Because private messages carry an expectation of privacy.

They're different parts of speech from the same root word, after all.

[delfinom]

Slack keeps those messages even if you delete the account when you leave. It's a data retention setting.

[hiatus]

Deleting company data before leaving probably won't end well.

[amenghra]

The correct mental security model here is “if you used an account on a company issued laptop/phone/any hardware” == “the company technically already has or can get access to the data”. There are so many ways for a company to do that.

Granted, some of these ways might be legal or not depending on jurisdiction, but then lots of company will thread or cross the legal fine line if they are happy with the risk/benefit trade off.

[the_gipsy]

And all but extremely early startups or cheapskate companies have the Enterprise version.

[camgunz]

I haven't checked in a while, but I think there's also an API for it too.