[Slack wants to replace email. Is that what we want?]

Slack’s business case for keeping your old messages is to have them ready for you just in case you decide to upgrade to the paid product, which has no limit on the number of messages available for you to search and view. But many users — including those most likely to be in the cross-hairs of a law enforcement request or headline-grabbing nation-state hack — are unlikely to ever make that switch.

Some might argue that Slack is the wrong tool for high-risk activists, who would benefit from strong encryption and the ability to host on their own servers — features that Slack doesn’t provide. But for many people, especially small and under-resourced organizations, self-hosting is not a viable option, and using strong encryption is prohibitively difficult. Slack is convenient, easy to use without extensive technical expertise and already familiar to most.

As its website cheerily reminds us, Slack is a “collaboration hub for work, no matter what work you do.” Slack is responsible for protecting the privacy and security of all its users, even the ones whose work brings risks that the company didn’t originally anticipate.

Slack should give everyone the same privacy protections available to its paying enterprise customers and let all of its users decide for themselves which messages they want to keep and which messages they want to delete. It’s undeniably Slack’s prerogative to charge for a more advanced product, but making users pay for basic privacy and security protections is the wrong call. It’s time for Slack to step up, minimize the amount of sensitive data hanging around on its servers and give all its users retention controls.

Gennie Gebhart (@jenuhhveev) is the associate director of research at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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