Activists are marching to Slack’s offices to force the company to adopt end-to-end encryption to better protect users against wiretapping.

It promises to be a busy day at the Slack offices in San Francisco and Denver. A coalition of more than ninety different organizations will stage a protest march at the communications app’s headquarters today. The move follows an open letter from digital rights organization Fight For The Future urging Slack to adopt end-to-end encryption.

End-to-end encryption is a technology that encrypts messages on both the sender and receiver side. This is to ensure that the message can only be read by the person for whom it is intended and cannot be intercepted by an eavesdropper during transmission. Many major messaging services like WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams offer E2E encryption, but Slack is holding back for now.

Think of the children

Despite its undeniable digital privacy benefits, E2E encryption is not without merits. Governments in particular are not always prepared for this. The argument that politicians like to use to gain occasional insight into our messages is that encryption ensures that criminals, drug dealers and pedophiles can go about their business unchecked if their communications are encrypted.

Fight For The Future sees it very differently and believes that Slack should prevent messages from users from being visible to everyone. “Every day that Slack doesn’t provide end-to-end encryption puts users at risk. That’s why we’re fully committed to urging the company to address this security issue,” activist Caitlin Seeley George told The Register.

Will Slack concede?

In a response, Slack defends its privacy policy. It states that data will be encrypted both in motion and at rest, and that it will give users the ability to delete messages. The company will also never share data with third parties, although US law allows for the sharing of data when required by the government. Tactically, it is still unclear whether Slack will give in to the pressure and introduce end-to-end encryption.