Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
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Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#2In this modern age it seems it's not safe to list anything which might come back to haunt you, including ethnicity.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#3Wow. This seems rather unprecedented and unnecessary, based upon the lack of action in this regard by other companies I don't know why Slack would do this. If for instance this kind of arbitrary action took place on GitHub I could see it having a detrimental impact to free software projects. This is another good reason to choose Zulipchat and other self-hostable platforms instead of proprietary SaaS solutions.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#4The user says he's connected to Slack from an Iranian IP address 6 months ago. That's likely the reason Slack was able to pinpoint him.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#5The user says he's connected to Slack from an Iranian IP address 6 months ago. That's likely the reason Slack was able to pinpoint him.
So if you once log in during a holiday trip to iran your account gets blocked
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#6I'm guessing Kremlin, D.C. sent them a list of names to embargo, and his name matched one of those names.
The "No-Fly List" has matched senators and congressmen. On the other hand, I find it interesting that they just do name matching, considering how easy it seemingly is to get a fake ID e.g. to buy booze (admittedly my point of reference is American movies).
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#7In this modern age it seems it's not safe to list anything which might come back to haunt you, including ethnicity.
Not just now, it never was a good idea to collect those information. You can look as far back as national census data with IBM and the holocaust.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#8In this modern age it seems it's not safe to list anything which might come back to haunt you, including ethnicity.
Face recognition will solve that for you.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#9The user says he's connected to Slack from an Iranian IP address 6 months ago. That's likely the reason Slack was able to pinpoint him.
So if you once log in during a holiday trip to iran your account gets blocked
Iran's been on my list of "wanna go" destinations for a while (Food and architecture mainly). Looks like I'd have to choose between that and having any connection with a US based company. Great.
Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
#10A couple of our employees from Syria also got blocked today. They were using Slack from Syria though.
EDIT: I don't understand why they ban/block the account rather than "simply" block access from IPs from the country. This seems really strange and overreaching.