When a company gets large or important enough it realizes that it has to follow some inconvenient laws.
In the US there's OFAC (https://www.treasury.gov/about/organizational-structure/offi...) which lists individuals and entities that companies cannot do business with. Implementing these rules is a nightmare for companies so they use a 3rd party services which produce a huge number of false positives. Middle eastern names tend result in many false positives.
My guess is that Slack is scrambling to clean house ahead of the IPO and they don't have a user friendly way of dealing with this. In fact most companies don't. This is the same crap that bites people who inadvertently end up on no-fly lists with no way to get off.
Don't like this? Call your representative. Build a better way to implement OFAC and similar laws.
2 year old seed round company with <10 employees. I don't imagine they have a whole lot of customers, and hopefully no customers that rely solely on them.
I had a similar realization a few months ago. On special occasions people at the office will photoshop someone's face onto a superhero and send it around.
When it came time for my female manager's face to be put on a superhero, I had a seriously hard time finding a SINGLE non sexualized picture of a well known female superhero. Try it -- pick a female superhero and do a google image search. Then count the number of pages you have to navigate before you find a picture that you'd photoshop your manager onto.
In the US there's OFAC (https://www.treasury.gov/about/organizational-structure/offi...) which lists individuals and entities that companies cannot do business with. Implementing these rules is a nightmare for companies so they use a 3rd party services which produce a huge number of false positives. Middle eastern names tend result in many false positives.
My guess is that Slack is scrambling to clean house ahead of the IPO and they don't have a user friendly way of dealing with this. In fact most companies don't. This is the same crap that bites people who inadvertently end up on no-fly lists with no way to get off.
Don't like this? Call your representative. Build a better way to implement OFAC and similar laws.