No, they blocked users based on location. I'm currently located in California, and this has nothing to do with my nationality.
Re:An Apology and an Update
by aervaertaera on Saturday December 22, 2018 @12:30AM
(#18739110)
Expats comprise less than 1% of the global population, and I doubt the number of international tourists at any given time pushes that percentage much higher. Use a VPN I guess, or better yet ditch Slack.
Likely a much higher percentage of Slack users though.
Nonsense. Much of Silicon Valley consists of foreigners, yet they didn’t block those users — a significant part of their user base ; thus the theory of ethnic or nationality blocking makes zero logical sense.
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> So, you blocked users based on their nationality.
Where you are currently located or resident is effectively unrelated to your nationality (unless you were born a citizen of your country and have never left it, not even for a vacation).
This comment by Slack was in response to several (fairly overblown) comments that they were racially targeting users ("Slack bans Iranian in Canada"), when in fact they were disabling accounts of people who have used Slack from an embargoed country at some point. To be clear, this is still bad, just not "blocking users based on their nationality". All of the outrage was over expats (or travellers) being blocked.
Re:An Apology and an Update
by martincmartin on Friday December 21, 2018 @11:22PM
(#18738887)
I'm Canadian, but live in Boston. My IP address shows where I live, not my nationality.
I was in London last month but that doesn't make me British.
IP != nationality or ethnicity.
Re:An Apology and an Update
by DonHopkins on Saturday December 22, 2018 @02:46AM
(#18739505)
You gotta wait for IPV7 where your DNA sequence is your IP address, so they can block you and all your descendants.
Okay, so how did you block them?
>As is standard in the enterprise software industry, Slack uses location information principally derived from IP addresses to implement these required blocks.
So, you blocked users based on their nationality.
>We do not collect, use, or possess any information about the nationality or ethnicity of our users.
you clearly possess enough information about the nationality of your users to block them based on it, which was your intent. You backpedaled when people who were not the target nationality began to complain.