How to protect your Slack account while you are alive
There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on a Slack account. While the account holder is alive, Slack Technologies allows transferring the account.
Slack Technologies decides requests about a Slack account after a death case by case, so nothing in its terms promises a survivor anything; what the account holder sets up in advance is what holds. There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on a Slack account. While the account holder is alive, Slack Technologies allows transferring the account.
How to protect your Slack accounts
Naming who acts after a death
- Designation
Slack has no way to name who acts on an account after a death. A workspace's Primary Owner role moves only when the Primary Owner transfers it to another member, or through Slack's review when the Primary Owner cannot be reached.1
What Slack Technologies, LLC (Salesforce)'s terms say about sharing and transfers3
- Workspace roles and admin access
A workspace has one Primary Owner at a time, the only person who can delete the workspace or transfer its ownership. Slack recommends promoting Owners and Admins and adding billing contacts.2
If a workspace is created with a corporate email domain, the organization is the Customer; if it is set up by someone not formally affiliated with an organization, the Customer is the person who created it.2
- Transferring the account or registration
The Primary Owner transfers the role from the transfer ownership page at my.slack.com/admin/transfer, confirming with their own password. The transfer is immediate, and the former Primary Owner becomes an Owner.1
Slack recommends adding a step to a company's off-boarding process so a departing employee transfers ownership before leaving, and says it may be able to help after the Primary Owner leaves, without promising to.2
- Exporting and backing up data
On every plan, Workspace Owners and Admins can export messages and file links from public channels. Exports that include private channels and direct messages are on Business+ and Enterprise plans, by application.3
Workspaces on the Free plan can export links to files from the last 90 days only. A Business+ application needs the Workspace Primary Owner's approval.3
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Sources
Data sourced from Slack Technologies, LLC (Salesforce) primary sources (7 pages reviewed). How we research.
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