Slack uses customer data to power machine learning features like relevance and ranking of search results, and the company has come under criticism for confusing policy updates that led many to believe customer data is being used to train the company's AI models.
According to the company's policy, anyone who wants to opt out must do so through their organization's Slack administrator, who must then notify the company via email to stop using their data.
Slack is Tech Radar Pro The information used to power ML, not AI, is anonymized and the content of messages is not accessed.
Slack criticized for using customer data to train AI models
Here's an excerpt from the company's privacy principles page:
“To develop non-generative AI/ML models for features like emoji and channel recommendations, our systems analyze Customer Data submitted to Slack (e.g. messages, content, files) and other information (including Usage Information) as defined in our Privacy Policy and Customer Agreement.”
Another passage reads, “To opt out, have your organization or workspace owner or primary owner contact our Customer Experience team at feedback@slack.com…”
We do not have a deadline for processing such requests.
In response to the uproar in the community, the company posted another blog post to address concerns, adding, “We do not build or train these models to learn, remember, or reproduce any kind of customer data.”
Slack confirmed that user data is not shared with third-party LLM providers for training purposes.
In its letter, the company said: Tech Radar Pro “Its intelligent features (not Slack AI) analyze metadata, such as user behavior data about messages, content and files, but do not access the content of messages.”
