Yes, this is what happened with me too. I assumed there was some way for the admin to view DMs, but on inspection, discovered there wasn't without first activating Compliance Exports. While it would be great to say that I was a hardened corporate peon that knew better than to fall for this, it wouldn't be completely true; I actually expected Slack to live up to that and not retroactively disclose DMs.

It's not that I necessarily wrote anything that would be a problem if it was disclosed (as others have pointed out, there were other workarounds to get DMs if the company really wanted them) -- it's just broken trust.

Access to DMs would've been par for the course if it had been the way Slack worked all along, but it's really disappointing to see them change it retroactively, insofar as that's what's actually happening.

The consensus here is of course correct: never trust anything done on company equipment, whether it's owned or rented (as in the case of a Slack channel) to be private, even if the owner of the rented property has given certain assurances. Money makes the world go 'round.

Yeah, it kinda sucks that they changed the privacy policy, but if you had actually read it, you'd have seen the part that says that they can change it any time for any reason.

And also, all they've done is give the corporation the technical ability to do something they've always been able to do -- read your private chats. It's just that before they had to do more work to do it, but they've always had the right to do it, regardless of what Slack's privacy policy said.