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Slack Doesn't Have End-to-End Encryption Because Your Boss Doesn't Want It (vice.com)
Business communications service Slack, which has more than three million paying customers, offers a bouquet of features that has made it popular (so popular that is worth as much as $9 billion), but it lacks a crucial feature that some of its rivals don't: end-to-end encryption. It's a feature that numerous users have asked Slack to add to the service. Citing a former employee of Slack and the company's chief information security officer, news outlet Motherboard reported Tuesday that the rationale behind not including end-to-end encryption is very simple: bosses around the world don't want it. From the report: Work communication service Slack has decided against the idea of having end-to-end encryption due to the priorities of its paying customers (rather than those who use a free version of the service.) Slack is not a traditional messaging program -- it's designed for businesses and workplaces that may want or need to read employee messages -- but the decision still highlights why some platforms may not want to jump into end-to-end encryption. End-to-end is increasingly popular as it can protect communications against from interception and surveillance. "It wasn't a priority for exec [executives], because it wasn't something paying customers cared about," a former Slack employee told Motherboard earlier this year.
This is a trivial thing to fix for a business. Slack can always have all messages done as part of a certain company (both to and from) be encrypted with an additional decryption key (ADK).
PGP Desktop had this functionality since the early 2000s, allowing encryption, but allowing businesses to easily recover encrypted E-mails, but yet not subverting private key security with key escrow or other backdoors.
With all the people into blockchains and applied cryptography, it is amazing this wasn't done.