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A comment on Slack raises $200M at $3.8B valuation for business messaging. Parent comment

Re:Slack raises $200M at $3.8B valuation for business messaging by ignoramous on Friday April 01, 2016 @10:29PM (#11409950)
Worse yet, what if the government decides it wants data that Slack holds and forces their hand?

I don't think this problem isn't solvable. Public crypto could help alleviate some of the pain. For instance, what you say holds true for most Google services (Gmail, search data, hangouts, data from Android), Github (private repos), Amazon (credit card data, purchase data), Uber/Lyft (travel data) or basically any popular WWW service with wide enough adoption. Nothing peculiar to Slack.

I wonder if the concerns you raised could be done away with if they started using crypto similar to ones used by Telegram or say, Signal by Open Whisper Systems.

Re: Data Retention: Slack could provide a TTL field and that would help solve that.

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Re:Slack raises $200M at $3.8B valuation for business messaging by freyr on Saturday April 02, 2016 @01:03AM (#11410302)
Users will need to demand it -- but I wonder if many users know enough to ask.

Gmail (at least free Gmail for individuals) won't have end-to-end encryption because their business model is to scan your email and serve you relevant ads.

But Slack, I don't see why not. I would like to try Slack on my team, but sending all of our unencrypted internal communications to a third-party is a bad idea. even if nothing bad happens, it's a bad idea.

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