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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

#261

Post by macspoofing »

jstanley wrote: post #17
gingerlime wrote: post #10

A 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.

> They were using Slack from Syria though. This doesn't excuse anything. People in Syria are people too. This is similar to how people were calling for websites to block access to Europe over the copyright thing. The internet is a place where you don't even need to have a nationality. It is a place where we can all exist as pure thoughts. Why are we letting politics fuck it up?

>This doesn't excuse anything. People in Syria are people too.

I don't get this attitude. Yes people in Syria are people too. Canadian steel exporters are people too, why do does their steel need to be tariffed when exported to United States? Why are American farmers punished when they export their dairy products to Canada, are they not people?

>The internet is a place where you don't even need to have a nationality.

SINCE WHEN?!?! It has never worked that way.

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

#262

Post by ivanhoe »

anthonys wrote: post #193
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No they aren't above the law. But to clarify, they gave a service to people/teams who maybe they shouldn't have. Did the people signing up/using Slack know that? Maybe. Who's responsible to ensure it's enforced? Slack.

This is not about blocking accounts of people in Iran, which is a totally legit thing to do. This is about blocking someone who is of Iranian origin, but claims to live in Canada for years and has no business connections with Iran whatsoever. Probably it's some automatic filtering hitting a false positive, but question is how that works, what criteria they use to search for "suspicious" accounts? Have they been given the list of accounts by some US agency or they track and profile their users? There's a lot of confidential business info floating through Slack channels, so it's a huge deal for all of us if they data-mine on that in some way.

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

#263

Post by walterbell »

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…

For more than a decade, Section 230 [1] has protected internet platforms from censorship of user-generated content. Why is Section 230 not applicable here, or is a similar law needed with wider scope?

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

> It is the policy of the United States— (1) to promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services and other interactive media; (2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation; (3) to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;

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

#264

Post by DanAndersen »

kypro wrote: post #210
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.

Yeah, they're clearly not checking the ethnicities of everyone using their service, but this still seems rather harsh, and with no appeals process too?

This is the danger when our lives become increasingly dependent on digital middlemen who are not regulated as utilities, where legislation has not caught up, who can proudly declare themselves "just a private company you have no say" and use nebulous ToS violations to shut people down.

When people violate actual law, we know which specific sentence in the written law was violated. We have a chance to defend ourselves. We have (supposedly) impartial judges and juries to help determine the truth.

Tech companies are building parallel institutions for judgment and execution, but building it for themselves and they have no plans to let their users have any say or transparency. It's a digital version of "rule of men" rather than "rule of law" -- "you're condemned because I, the King, say so."

This will continue until external powers (regulation) force the quasi-digital-fiefdoms to open up. Hemming and hawing about "gee, this is kinda harsh" won't have an effect on them.

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

#266

Post by itchyouch »

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 needs to be as close to convenient in order to catch the masses.

Even on the technical side, most tech products have convenience as a selling point to being more productive/effective/agile, etc.

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

#267

Post by IncRnd »

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…

Just because he said that he has no connection to Iran does not make that true. If you carefully read the tweets, Amir says that he travelled to Iran. It might be that Slack did something ridiculous, but that can't be seen from the data.

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

#268

Post by novaRom »

manigandham wrote: post #72
jstanley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were using Slack from Syria though. This doesn't excuse anything. People in Syria are people too. This is similar to how people were calling for websites to block access to Europe over the copyright thing. The internet is a place where you don't even need to have a nationality. It is a place where we can all exist as pure thoughts. Why are we letting politics fuck it up?

The internet is not a place. It only functions to connect people and places which exist in physical locations that are bound by national and regional laws, and the transfer of data between locations is subject to these rules.

Well said! About this particular case, what rules are applied?

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

#270

Post by paulcole »

corebit wrote: post #233
spacehome wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not entitled to Slack's infrastructure, no matter how much you came to depend on it for your day-to-day life.

Well that's not strictly true. Presumably there is a contract of some sort, and Slack must abide by it, entitling users to Slack's infrastructure to some degree. It's not completely arbitrary. Plus there're notions of estoppel potentially at play.

Pretty sure the contract is going to be in Slack’s favor. They had all the leverage when somebody agreed to it.

https://slack.com/terms

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