Slack has found a new way to make you buy its premium plans. It will no longer store your message history and files, which are more than a year old, for the lifetime of your workspace. Starting August 26, 2024, Slack will delete message history and files permanently for free workspace users on a rolling basis.
If you're a free user in the current setup, Slack shows up to 90 days of messages and files you upload. You need a premium subscription to access the older history, which isn't deleted but kept hidden until you upgrade.
The latest change means Slack will only keep your message history and files for up to one year. You'll still get the 90-day full access for free and unlock the extra 275 days when you upgrade to a paid plan.
"Going forwards, this workspace data will be deleted on a continuous basis once it’s more than a year old," Slack said on a support page. It cautions that if you plan to upgrade to the paid Slack after August 26, it'll not be possible to restore messages and files once deletion occurs.
The said change also applies to people using the trial version of Slack. Once the trial ends, the data in their workspace "will be subject to our message and file deletion policy for free workspaces." However, it added that the new message history limit doesn't affect Slack Connect channels and they "will continue to work normally, and any messages and files that they contain will remain available."
Slack will also tweak data retention settings for free workspaces, where users will have to choose whether messages or files (including edits) are deleted after 90 days or kept for a year. They will no longer see an option to keep their data for the lifetime of their workspace.
The latest update comes a month after the team messaging platform was accused of using customer data such as messages, content, and files to train its AI models. However, in a statement to Neowin, Slack defended itself and said "those machine learning models do not access original message content in DMs, private channels, or public channels to make these suggestions.”
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