So this was the week everyone lost their minds over GPT-4o's voice demo and then Google I/O happened a day later and buried it under a pile of "AI Overviews" and Project Astra teasers. I'm not going to rehash all of that here, you've read six other blogs do it already and honestly the keynote clips are still sitting in my YouTube "watch later" list, unwatched. What actually made me sit up and email our whole team on Thursday was a much smaller story that most of the AI coverage steamrolled right past: Slack quietly changed its privacy policy to let it train machine learning models on your messages, files, and data, and unless someone in your workspace goes and opts out, it's on by default.
This started making the rounds a few days ago when someone pulled up the actual policy language and it says, more or less, that Slack "may use Customer Data... to develop and improve" its AI/ML models. Slack came back and clarified (technically accurately, if you squint) that they don't use your private messages to train generative AI features like the Slack AI summarizer add-on. What they DO use your data for is more mundane stuff: emoji suggestions, autocomplete, search result ranking, channel recommendations, that kind of thing. Which sounds harmless until you realize the distinction between "generative AI" and "machine learning model" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence, and most people skimming a privacy policy update at 11pm are not going to catch it.
Here's the part that actually annoyed me though: there's no toggle for this. Not in workspace settings, not under admin preferences, nowhere I could find after ten minutes of clicking around our own workspace (and I run the thing, so if I can't find it, good luck to everyone else). The actual documented way to opt out, at least as of this week, is to have a Workspace Owner or Org Admin email Slack directly at their feedback address and ask to be excluded, referencing your workspace/org URL. That's it. That's the opt-out flow for a company with, what, tens of millions of daily active users. An email. In 2024.
I did it Thursday afternoon. Took about ninety seconds to write, and I still don't have a confirmation back, so I genuinely don't know if it worked or if it's sitting in some queue behind ten thousand identical requests from IT admins who all read the same three articles I did.
If you want to do the same thing for your own workspace, here's roughly what worked for me:
- Go find your workspace's URL (yourteam.slack.com — you'll need this in the email).
- As a Workspace Owner or Org Admin, send an email to Slack's feedback address stating you want to opt your organization out of having its data used for AI/ML model training.
- Include your workspace name and URL explicitly, don't assume they'll match it to your account automatically.
- Save a copy of what you sent. If this becomes a bigger deal later (and given how this week went, I wouldn't bet against it) you'll want a paper trail.
None of this is a huge deal in isolation: emoji autocomplete getting slightly smarter because it learned from aggregate workspace data isn't exactly a privacy apocalypse. What bugs me is the pattern, not the specific feature. Default-on, opt-out-by-email is a design choice, not an accident, and it's one I keep running into with SaaS tools that used to feel like they were on my side. Notion did something similar last year. I assume the next one is already in the pipeline somewhere.
I'll say this too, since I've got the soapbox out already: if your product needs a paragraph of legal hedging to explain why training-on-customer-data isn't really training-on-customer-data-the-scary-kind, maybe don't ship the feature the way you shipped it. Write the update, sure. Just put a checkbox on it and let people say no during onboarding instead of making them go dig through a support article three weeks later like I did on a Thursday afternoon when I had actual work to do.
Anyway. If you run a Slack workspace for a side project, a small team, a Discord-replacement-that-somehow-became-Slack situation like half the internet has going on right now, go check your settings, or lack thereof, and send that email if it matters to you. Took me less time than writing this post did.