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Comment by robteix | Hacker News Reader

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 easily be able to verify with him that he lives in Canada. Instead, they simply block it and bye. I find this extremely hostile.

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> 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 know how that works given how Huawei is a Chinese company, but there you go.

To clarify: private companies are not and should not be above the law.

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.

"maybe" shouldn't have. So not "certanly" shouldn't have, just "maybe"?

This is another strong case for open source software development along with open, publicly available, standards and protocols.

This isn't about Slack, it isn't about US sanctions law. It is about any private entity creating closed sourced, remotely hosted software. Everyone knows that APIs can be pulled at any time (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) Spying can be mandated whether it is the US government, China, or anyone else.

As end users it is never clear what is going on behind the curtain. It is never certain the product will be here tomorrow - whatever the reason. No one would build a high rise where all of the elevators could suddenly vanish, yet we are increasingly putting the critical pieces of our businesses and our lives in the hands of entities that only need to flick a switch and everything instantly vanishes.

> No one would build a high rise where all of the elevators could suddenly vanish

You also wouldnt build a highrise where all elevators are built by a random Joe, who you arent even sure if thats his real name

To put a finer point on it: open communications protocols driven by free software and end-to-end encryption both are and should be above the law, at least where the law purports to create national boundaries on the internet.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

That's a nice fantasy but the reality is that humans and computers still have to physically exist inside national boundaries. Flesh and steel still count for a lot.

That's why free/libre software advocates talk so frequently about technologies that could abstract flesh and steel away.

How exactly would that work?

Tor, bittorrent, bitcoin and other decentrialized open source software are great examples. No government can control what no one controls.

Buying and installing your own permanent elevators is too difficult and expensive. Think of what happens in 25 years when they need to be replaced. You'd be a fool not to pay a monthly fee for elevators-as-a-service.

> 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.

The law isn't a magical paragon of morality.

When the law is as clearly wrong as this one is, it should be violated.

What is so clearly wrong about trade sanctions between two countries? Do you think foreign trade is always a moral good?

> What is so clearly wrong about trade sanctions between two countries?

What trade sanctions have been applied to Canada?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Canada doesn't have anything to do with this. Amir's account was closed because of his Iranian ties, not his Canadian ones.

The part that's clearly wrong is stopping innocent people from engaging in harmless trade. If it weren't for the sanction, it would probably be illegal for slack to deliberately block Iranians just because of the country they're from.

And something doesn't have to be morally good for stopping it to be morally bad. For example, playing chess is morally completely neutral, but it would be morally bad to attempt to ban chess.

Likewise, Iranians using slack isn't obviously morally good, it seems morally neutral, but enforcing a slack ban against Iranians is obviously morally bad.

Simple: it costs them money and resources to go through the process you described, whereas it costs them almost nothing to directly close the account and send an automated message.

I wouldn't call "reputation" nothing or less valuable than money.

I've only ever seen one company actually have a "reputation" metrics mentioned in the employee onboarding or customer support and outages.

The value of that intangible asset is called 'goodwill' and the market gives it a value. Worldcom had to slash around $80 billion dollars in lost 'goodwill'.

At least give them access to a downloadable archive of all their content and maybe inform other users that interacted with this user about alternative methods of contact.

I wonder if it's like being fired, they are concerned that you may fly off the handle with your last bit of time so they confiscate all your tools as quick as possible.

>Aside from the obvious wrong of blocking people based on their origin

How is that an 'obvious wrong'? That's how sanctions work. Sanctions are laws that prevent companies in one region from doing business with companies from another region.

>Taking the OP's story at face value, Slack should easily be able to verify with him that he lives in Canada. Instead, they simply block it and bye. I find this extremely hostile.

That I agree with. Slack should do better. But doing better means doing more investigative work and you probably don't want to delegate that to your frontline tech support worker, so it means it's expensive and not particularly scalable.

Its not a companies fault. Its governement.

No it’s the companies fault. Export restrictions can’t be applied indiscriminately. Laws are open to interpretation and they have interpreted this law in letter not in spirit.

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