However, Fight for the Future Campaign director Caitlin Seeley George said that Slack, which was named alongside other companies such as Meta, Twitter and Google in the “Make DMs Safe” campaign, hasn’t been responsive to the group’s requests. In the aftermath of Dobbs, companies such as Meta doubled down on existing encryption efforts. Fight for the Future launched its campaign last year in response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion, a ruling that led to concerns that abortion seekers’ unsecured communications could be used against them in criminal prosecutions. The letter from groups such as the Mozilla Foundation and the Tor Project is the latest step in a campaign led by the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future that urges messaging companies to adopt encryption. While there are no reported instances of Slack messages being weaponized in these cases, the trove of communications the platform collects from clients ranging from government agencies to activists has made users’ communications a target of both lawsuits and hackers. Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion last summer. We call on Slack to go beyond statements and put into action its commitment to human rights by implementing basic safety and privacy design features immediately.”Ĭoncerns about the security of private messages have come into greater focus in recent years due to a number of factors, including the rise of government use of spyware on activists and dissidents as well as the increased risks posed to reproductive rights after the U.S. “At this political moment, this can mean life or death for some people online. “Right now, Slack is falling short in terms of the most basic guardrails for platform safety and privacy,” a group of 93 organizations wrote in the letter. A broad coalition of technology, civil liberties, reproductive justice and privacy advocacy groups are urging the global workplace collaboration platform Slack to offer end-to-end encryption so that its users’ messages can’t be read by government officials or eavesdropping bosses.

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