PSA: Slack Holds Your Messages Hostage
I’m in the process of cancelling services as part of the winding down of AdDuplex. Most of it went well, but then there’s Slack…
We’ve been using Slack for 10+ years and paying for the Pro plan for most of it. Even when Teams came out and as an Office 365 customer we could have saved on a “redundant” service, we decided to stay with Slack, as we liked it more. But now it’s the end of the road for the organization and I wanted to switch to the Free plan and eventually shut it down.
The thing about the Free plan is that you can only access up to 10,000 messages in history from the last 90 days (or something like that). This is fair. Having said that, we’ve been paying for this thing for 10 years, so we definitely have something like 4,000 days and 600,000 messages in history. And even though I understand and accept that I won’t be able to directly access older messages in Slack, I would still like to have them in some form.
Naturally, I expected I could go and export our messages before switching. Wrong! Via the “Standard Export” you can only export the public channels. I don’t know what other organizations have in public channels, but in our case, these were primarily reserved for memes and alike. Which means that in reality I can’t export anything useful.
If you want to be able to export messages from private channels and DMs, you have to upgrade to Business+:
But event that comes with a double asterisk:
**Workspace Owners and Org Owners must apply to use these export types.
And what does “must apply” mean?
Workspace Owners can apply to access a self-service tool that allows them to export data from all channels and conversations in their workspace as needed and permitted by law.
“Needed and permitted by law” obviously means something very different from “I want my DMs”.
One caveat of “as needed and permitted by law” that would make sense in this case is this (only applies to EU residents, but works for me):
A former employee requests to be provided with a copy of the information their former employer retained about them, as required by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
So, the only way I could reasonably expect to get my DMs with other people on my team is to quit my job (it says “former employee” for some reason), upgrade to Business+ and then write a GDPR data request to myself (as a business owner) to compel me to give me my data and then forward that to Slack.
But even then, as far as I understand, I would get access to a COMPLETE export. And I explicitly DON’T WANT to get access to private DMs of my employees from 2015. That would be creepy. I just want my DMs — these are my messages with data that is potentially useful to me.
The only other option offered to me by Slack’s support was to give access to all of my messages to some 3rd party app and export through there. And that, obviously, comes with a warning that Slack doesn’t vet those apps.
This is not OK!
I don’t know how it is in Teams or other services, but this is ridiculous. Slack’s proposition was always centered around replacing email. But guess what, I can still get all my emails from 1997 (not that I want to). Yet, with Slack I’m now facing abandoning 10 years of conversations. My conversations.
I understand that Slack is a business and needs to differentiate its commercial plans. A reasonable approach, in my opinion, would be to flip this on its head: all users on Pro plan can export their own DMs, and enterprises on more expensive plans can restrict this capability. This would be in line with Pro vs. Business+ vs. Enterprise designation.
I guess I’ll just try to convince myself that I’d never look into those archives anyway. And to stay away from Slack in my future endeavors.
