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Comment by alexandercrohde | Hacker News Reader

Jesus, nobody here has any clue what they're talking about.

Slack has allowed companies to read private messages for well over a year. It has been called "compliance exports" and you as a slack user could always see if you had them turned on, as well as which individuals had access to read your private messages. Source: CTO of a unicorn confirmed he had used this feature to read private communications (private rooms and DMs), source 2 - used this page myself at multiple companies

Employers had to pay for this privilege. It's super unclear to me what the new policy is-- it looks like there's still no privacy but it happens via API.

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Previously if compliance exports were turned off, then later turned on, users would receive a notification that all future DM's would be available for export by their employer.

My understanding is that now the entire archive is readily available for download, including the content from before compliance exports was turned on.

The fact that they specify that consent is required on the free plan but not on the Plus or Enterprise plan suggests that the old compliance export requirements have changed. The old compliance export process required consent AND it only allowed you to access data from that point forward. The changes introduced today seem to suggest that historic data is now available by default.

How fine-grained is the tool? Do you select a channel and export only the contents of that? Can you select only two users and only get messages between them? Or is it blunt and you simple download all data (the text makes it seem that way)?

I ask, because if it's the latter it borders on illegal to click on that button (and get ALL private conversations), at the very least it needs to be heavily regulated within the firm who can click it and how the downloaded data is stored / accessed.

It is incredibly blunt, at least for compliance exports — all you can do is export the whole workspace — and once exported it's just a ZIP of thousands of JSON files. There is no tool to look at it with. When I had to do an export I found a PHP script somebody had written to turn the JSON into thousands of HTML files, but otherwise it was grep and jq.

That sounds less promising, I had hoped you could select a single channel and export it. Or even better give permission to a user to be able to export one channel. We often have Slack channels shared with clients etc. and they have asked before to get a transcript of chats for reference. If you had fine-grained control, you could give that access to the project manager for the client in question, without having to share the access / have a central moderator handle all requests.

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