Slack App Releases Transparency Report That Reveals Zero Data Requests

Workplace communication app Slack has been used by big tech companies, like Google and Microsoft, and has been signing on many startups and media outlets, making the fast-growing app a haven for information and content. But since launching the app in beta form in August 2013, the company has yet to receive a request for that user data or content removal from the government.

The news comes from a blog post on Slack’s website. Within the post, Slack’s vice president of people, policy and compliance, Anne Toth, announced that the nearly 2-year-old company has published its first transparency report.

“Hard as it is to believe, to date Slack has not received a single request for user data or a single content removal request,” Toth wrote.

Releasing a public report on government requests is not required for companies by law. However, the act has been popularized since Google released its data in 2010 in a blog post called “Greater transparency around government requests.” Since then, Google has released a semiannual “Transparency Report.” Other companies have followed suit, with Twitter in 2012 and Facebook in 2013.

The reports have provided insight into what governments are interested in the data. The United States was the most represented in Google’s 2014 report.

Why now for Slack? A Slack representative told International Business Times that the company has frequently been asked about legal and government requests for user data and how Slack complies. And so, the company chose to publicize the data.

Indeed, this effort brings transparency to what the company’s policy is even before it has received any requests. Slack was scrutinized for not acting sooner on other matters in March, when its central user database was hacked, and the app previously had not provided tighter security options such as two-factor authentication.

Slack was also criticized for privacy and security in October 2014, when Gawker’s Sam Biddle revealed the names of chat rooms were visible to anyone, to some companies’ surprise. Slack denied the visibility as a flaw in the system but later chose to change the settings.

Users had notified the company of the setting. But a Slack representative said that would not be considered a content takedown request because no team communication content was exposed.

On Friday, Slack also launched a page that describes its user data request policy. The company wrote that requests for content should first be sent to an individual account’s administrator.

Slack was last valued at $2.8 billion, after raising $160 million of new funding in April. The company has raised $340 million to date and was said to have more than 750,000 daily users as of April 16.