Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 638 posts

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#251

Post by quickthrower2 »

andybak wrote: post #148
deadbunny wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, so your option is "uninstall app" or "never visit country/region I've always wanted to". Tough choice. I'm not defending slack or practices like it (hell, I have a blank phone I use whenever I leave the country) but it's not quite the choice you're making it out to be.

> Sure, so your option is "uninstall app" The problem is "which app?". Short of a factory reset on both my phone, laptop and kindle it seems I would be in danger of tripping a switch somewhere.

Ah well it’s probably smart to take a fresh phone through borders anyway.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#252

Post by aplummer »

This guy is straight up lying, with no intention of correctly his false claim this is racial targeting.

Even after confirming with a white person banned for using slack while visiting Iran, he continued to claim in the thread it is racial.

Reality: he was banned for using slack with an Iranian IP.

Whether or not that’s export control overreach / unethical / bad business not my point, it’s clearly very different to ethnic targeting.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#253

Post by dahart »

geofft wrote: post #211
icebraining wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it wasn't given up, what would the lawsuit complain be, and what would one gain from it if it succeeds? Isn't Slack legally entitled to shut down any accounts at any time?

One, no, you are not legally entitled to shut down accounts on the basis of race or national origin, if that's what they're doing. Two, they may have to at least return the data: if I let you use a desk at my place and you start doing business there, I am pretty sure I cannot legally refuse you entry and hold on to your papers . Three, even if they are, we're also legally entitled to call Slack incompetent losers, an…

> no, you are not legally entitled to shut down accounts on the basis of race or national origin, if that’s what they’re doing.

That’s not what the parent comment said, you’re twisting it with an assumption. Slack is not legally obligated to provide Slack accounts to anyone, that was the point.

> they may have to at least return the data: if I let you use a desk at my place and you start doing business there, I am pretty sure I cannot legally refuse you entry and hold on to your papers.

Your analogy is rather confused. The data Slack has isn’t equivalent to your papers that you dropped on their desk. When you sign up for Slack, you enter into a contract outlined in their Terms of Service that detail explicitly what they agree to be responsible for. In particular, here’s the agreement relating to your data:

“Following termination or expiration of a workspace’s subscriptions, we will have no obligation to maintain or provide any Customer Data and may thereafter, unless legally prohibited, delete all Customer Data in our systems or otherwise in our possession or under our control.”

https://slack.com/terms-of-service

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#254

Post by macspoofing »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #159
robteix wrote: post #105

Aside from the obvious wrong of blocking people based on their origin, what's up with these companies closing accounts with no warning and no recourse? I know they're private companies and they _can_ do it, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. Why not give the user even a few days notice so they can communicate with support to try and clear things up? Taking the OP's story at face value, Slack should eas…

> I know they're private companies and they _can_ do it, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. Actually, if you look at the image, Slack is beholden to US law, export regulations and economic sanctions - companies doing business with countries they shouldn't are in big trouble. See also: Huawei, who despite sanctions continued to do business with Iran, which caused the US to give them a huge fine. I don't…

> I don't know how that works given how Huawei is a Chinese company, but there you go.

If Huawei didn't care about doing business with American companies or companies that adhere to American regulations, it wouldn't matter at all.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#255

Post by uberswe »

simias wrote: post #234
jstanley wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is the future of the web. This sort of thing is a temporary blip before everybody figures out decentralised solutions for everything. Decentralisation is clearly the end game as long as politics causes problems like this. A decentralised solution will continue to "just work", while centralised solutions continue to boot people off. It's pretty obvious which one is going to win.

Except looking at the past 20 years or so it seems clear that the trend is going the other way around. Slack itself is an example of that, not long ago it would've been a set of self-hosted tools. People have ditched IRC in favor of Discord and friends, they've ditched decentralized forums, BBSs and mailing lists for social networks, everybody hosts everything using the same four or five cloud providers, streaming an…

It will take time before decentralised services become mainstream. It's slow right now and we are still learning, we need things to be easier. The backend is basically figured out at this point and we need to focus a bit more on UX.

Regarding torrents, many game clients will use torrents for their downloads, the user simply doesn't see and deal with the torrenting.

Don't confuse self-hosted with decentralised, not the same :)

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#256

Post by gingerlime »

wil421 wrote: post #218
gingerlime wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

last I checked there are no restrictions on employment of Syrian people in the EU/UK, unless they are related to the government or military etc.

You just said you didn’t know and now all of the sudden you do? It seems the harder restrictions were lifted in 2014 in the EU due to member state disputes.

I said that I'm not sure, but that I doubt it. I then spent some time checking, and couldn't find anything to support your claim. If you have any sources that EU countries are forbidden from employing "normal" Syrian people (now or even before 2014), I'd love to see them. Otherwise, it really feels like you're just trolling to be honest.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#257

Post by rvense »

pjc50 wrote: post #169
dustinmoris wrote: post #147

Wow the Twitter thread and the experiences which are mentioned here sound so extreme and crazy that I am seriously confused to what believe. - Is this all made up to prove some point? - Is this just how the US ticks right now? - Is Slack just completely gone mad? - Is this what companies believes is acceptable nowadays? - Is this the future of the web? The fact that I am not sure what to believe and that I wouldn't b…

It's the dystopia of the film Brazil : someone makes a typo in a database, someone else's life is dramatically inconvenienced, and it's impossible for them to access any means of redress. > Is this just how the US ticks right now? Yes.

Maybe Slack just proved that you actually don't have to pick between malice and incompetence.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#258

Post by bad_user »

This happened to our cofounder as well.

His Slack account was blocked today, with that same message.

The crazy thing is that he's Irish and living in the EU, with no actual ties with the countries being mentioned.

He does travel for business purposes outside of Europe, but again, not in the listed countries.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#259

Post by Raphmedia »

mirimir wrote: post #190

So is this really an accurate title? It seems most likely that Slack has geolocated IP addresses from account access logs, and closed accounts with hits from sanctioned countries. Perhaps going back years. That in itself seems over the top. But it doesn't constitute ethnic profiling. But if someone has a counterexample, that would be OK too.

That's a bit scary. As a developer, I often test websites performances / features using a VPN. Since Slack is the platform developers use to communicate, it often stays open as I test "from other countries". My Slack IP log likely has accesses from all over the world.

Re: Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

#260

Post by raesene9 »

hnauz wrote: post #249
blindwatchmaker wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah imagine bitching because you lost a primary communication tool and a bunch of your saved data because of your ethnicity.

That's not what happened at all, that's why it's hard to take him seriously. He makes it look like Slack went out of their way to look at all of their users and check of what race they are to ban those who are Iranians, when they just made a geoip check.

If they're just doing GeoIP checking, wouldn't it have made more sense for them to just block access from those countries, which would be an inconvenience to their users, instead of retroactively removing their accounts?
Post reply on HN