[geofft]

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, and to tell our employers that we should not switch to Slack if we wish to continue being co-workers with Iranians. I will be telling my employer that shortly. (One fascinating aide effect of using Slack is thst the entire company must conform to Slack's policies. You cannot hire someone whom Slack won't create an account for, nor someone who won't agree to Slack's ToS, because if they're not on Slack they can't get work done.)

[dahart]

> 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

[honzzz]

> "will have no obligation to maintain or provide any Customer Data..."

I have to admit that this case (and some others I read in recent days, e.g. MailChimp account deleted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866 ) made me aware that the terms of some popular services can be much worse than I would expect. I should really start reading those terms. Thank you for helping me reduce my naivety.

[geofft]

> Slack is not legally obligated to provide Slack accounts to anyone, that was the point.

And this point is untrue. As long as Slack provides accounts to the general public, they are required by law not to discriminate when doing so on the basis of race or national origin. They can stop serving everyone. They can firewall access from Iran, or identify actual persons covered by the sanctions. But they are legally obligated to serve Iranians as much as they serve anyone else.

> Following termination or expiration of a workspace’s subscriptions

One, this is an individual account, not a workspace. The workspace remains active.

Two, terms of service don't override law. There may or may not be law that overrides this and says that certain rights cannot be signed away. (For instance, if you're subject to the GDPR, my understanding is it would override it.)

[dahart]

> terms of service don't override law.

Correct, agreed!

> As long as Slack provides accounts to the general public

Slack does not provide accounts to the general public, in any legal sense. Slack is a private business, not a public service. Please read the terms of service to understand the terminology.

> they are required by law to not discriminate

Well, they are required by law to discriminate against traffic to Iran.

But, again, you've twisted my meaning to make your own separate point. I wasn't talking about discrimination. Slack is not compelled by law to provide accounts to someone. They can legally refuse service to someone who lives in Iran, or connects to Slack from servers located in Iran.

> But they are legally obligated to serve Iranians as much as they serve anyone else.

That statement is true in the sense that Slack is under no legal obligation to provide their service to anyone, outside of the agreement they created. That is separate from and irrelevant to whether or not they're allowed to discriminate against the people Slack agrees to provide service to, under their terms of service contract.

> they are required by law not to discriminate

BTW, what law are you talking about specifically? I'm aware of civil rights for US citizens, and anti-discrimination employment law in the US, but not of a specific law that bars online discrimination. I personally believe discrimination online would be wrong and bad, but are you certain that it's illegal?

Keep in mind we're talking about someone in Canada connecting to a US service, with a plausible decent chance that he connected from Iran or through an Iran server and just forgot about it. I'm not aware of specific US anti-discrimination or civil rights laws that would protect Amir in this case.

[yamazaki]

Slack doesn't even know someone's race or ethnicity, thus can't discriminate against that. They are just disabling accounts based on the IP they were created from, which was the best they had to go by to abide the sanctions. This is for sure inexact and bound to have false positives though.

[CPLX]

It’s not quite that simple. A case could be made that other variables are a proxy for race or national origin, and travel to specific countries is one of them.

Of course that argument has an opposing side as well, but it seems prima facie plausible as a cause of action.

[dahart]

Exactly. Assuming ethnic discrimination seems pretty unwarranted.

[lukeschlather]

> Slack is not legally obligated to provide Slack accounts to anyone

Slack is legally obligated to provide Slack accounts to people who pay, with 30 days notice for termination in most cases. There is this stipulation:

> We may terminate the Contract immediately on notice to Customer if we reasonably believe that the Services are being used by Customer or its Authorized Users in violation of applicable law.

However, if they are terminating accounts based on ethnicity that doesn't seem like a reasonable belief they can use to justify applying export controls.

[dahart]

> Slack is legally obligated to provide Slack accounts to people who pay

Rather, Slack agrees to provide accounts to people who pay and agree to the contract in return.

That little stipulation is exactly what is in effect here. Slack believes the users are in violation of the agreement, and under the legal rules that Slack established and controls, they enforce immediate termination.

> if they are terminating accounts based on ethnicity

This defending of the argument based on wild assumptions that Slack is ethnically profiling is a bad place to start from. That hasn't been shown, nor is it very likely.

On the other hand, Slack is legally obligated to block traffic to Iran, and it's within reason to assume an account that ever had any traffic in Iran broke the law. It's certainly possible that Amir forgot that he used an Iran proxy, or traveled there. It's possible that someone on his team broke the rule without his knowledge. It's also possible that Slack made a mistake, which can and does happen from time to time at many companies when trying to enforce international laws using only IP traffic logs. None of that points at Slack intentionally terminating accounts based on ethnicity.

[TomMarius]

Digital data is not paper.