[xenophonf]

While it's perfectly legal for your wife, a Canadian, to go to Cuba, it's still embargoed by the U.S., and Slack as a U.S. company must comply with the embargo (even though your wife has done nothing wrong per Canadian law).

[thumb]

That's true, but why does that mean they need to shut down her account just because she visited Cuba? Would that mean a grocery store would then have to refuse to sell you their goods because you visited the country once?

[xenophonf]

The guy's wife didn't do anything wrong. Slack broke the law by providing an embargoed service to someone in Cuba. I'll bet money that when this was discussed with their compliance officer, the lawyers and engineers and everyone else agreed to use certain metrics (like source IP) to determine whether someone fell under the embargo. Otherwise, Slack would have to spend a lot of time and money validating people's identity, etc., in order to comply. I don't really fault them for taking this path because their exposure is huge and compliance is hard.

Your analogy about grocery stores doesn't really work because logging into Slack isn't the same thing as walking into a grocery store, because buying from a grocery store isn't the same thing as exporting food across a national boarder, and because neither food nor medicine is embargoed.

[yamazaki]

They didn't shut down their account because she visited Cuba, but because her account was created _from_ Cuba. It's unfortunate but I guess it's the only way Slack has to "know" where an account is from.

[TeMPOraL]

It's the laziest possible way. They could've looked at most frequent login IPs instead.

[true_religion]

They should never have allowed the account to be created from Cuba in the first place. Slack when it was younger, didn't have good policies in place to actually follow US law. As such, now that they are reviewing their old records they realized they committed illegal actions that they need to clean up.

Yes, it harms their customers, but that harm and the resulting damages to Slack' reputation (and maybe legal costs), is what they must pay for being negligent in the past.

[794CD01]

Not a great analogy since you normally can't shop at an American grocery store from Cuba, but you can use an American web site from there.

[sonnyblarney]

That's a good point except that Slack shouldn't be banning people that are not violating sanctions.

In this case, if the account was actually opened from Cuba ... that could be a problem.

What they should do is offer recourse and a way to have this resolved.

[floatingatoll]

They did offer an appeals process, but that can be safely assumed not to be a process for appealing the US law and their interpretation of it — it’s much more likely a process for appealing technical errors committed by accident during bulk work, such as “you identified my IP as Cuba when it’s Florida” or “I was hacked and we discussed that back then, please recheck your logs excluding the hacker’s activity”.

So they are absolutely offering recourse and resolution, but only where it is in their power to do so.

TLDR: Don’t expect Slack to be responsive to arguments that contain “please ignore US law for my individual circumstances”.

[izacus]

What other life-long punishments does she deserve for doing that horrible deed? Completely removed Google account with all her data? Permanent ban from any grocery store? Revoked driver license? Lifelong ban from Amazon, HN and other US services?