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This is absolutely hilarious. This dude owns company that builds an array of products around identifying your users, storing as much information about them as p

• tome 8y ago
  Why would they do that unless their competitors are mandated to also?
• staplers 8y ago
  Well.. a privacy law banning everyone except those who are grandfathered in to collect data..
  • rckclmbr 8y ago
    They will help create the legislation so that it benefits their company and makes it harder for differentiated competitors. It also forces you to have more capital in order to implement those practices (which salesforce has), which means only big companies can compete. This is unfortunate. As more and more big tech companies do this, the tech industry is turning more and more into the bad guy, and something I didn't want to be involved in. I don't know, maybe he's being authentic and is seeing a problem, but the way the industry has been headed just makes me not trust it.
    • cptskippy 8y ago
      > This is unfortunate. As more and more big tech companies do this, the tech industry is turning more and more into the bad guy, and something I didn't want to be involved in. This is true of most established industries like Pharmaceuticals, Chemical, Nuclear, Mining, and Automotive.
      • rckclmbr 8y ago
        I'm not disagreeing, I was just hoping we could be better.
• papeda 8y ago
  It's plenty reasonable to be skeptical of the public utterances of CEOs, but it's not necessarily true that his words are hollow because his company is not currently compliant with the law he's proposing. As long as competitors are free to ignore this proposed privacy requirement it probably makes no competitive sense for his company to comply with it. In that case, it's perfectly logical to agitate for a law, which would let you adhere to stricter privacy requirements confident that your competition has to do so as well.
  • craftyguy 8y ago
    This is a classic case of a well established company lobbying for regulations to keep newcomers out of their sector.
    • cujo 8y ago
      How would this keep newcomers out?
      • askafriend 8y ago
        Cost ($$, time, etc) of compliance impacts newcomers more than incumbents.
      • craftyguy 8y ago
        Salesforce relied on things this 'privacy law' would make illegal in order to get where they are today. This law would prevent other companies from following in their footsteps.
        • criddell 8y ago
          Yes. We are learning from our mistakes.
        • thrav 8y ago
          That’s really not true at all. DMP was a very recent acquisition, as was Marketing Cloud and Pardot. Core Salesforce is a company data store often requiring human data input. It’s where your information goes when you fill out a “Contact us” form on somebody’s website.
• Mononokay 8y ago
  Salesforce is a public company, which means the CEO has a legal duty to optimize for maximum benefit for the shareholders of said company under the law. "Change the law so I don't have to do scummy things," is actually fairly rational.
  • twblalock 8y ago
    > Salesforce is a public company, which means the CEO has a legal duty to optimize for maximum benefit for the shareholders of said company under the law. That's a common misconception. It's not true.
    • Mononokay 8y ago
      Not Statute, but case law. See eBay vs. Newmark. Unless I'm misinterpreting something about it, in which case, can you explain? (Genuine question there.)
      • gowld 8y ago
        Choose an article to read from these results: https://www.google.com/search?q=myth+maximize+shareholder+value https://www.google.com/search?q=myth+maximize+shareholder+va...
        • Mononokay 8y ago
          Literally every one of those goes against current case law, which can be seen in eBay v. Newmark; plus "LMGTFY" isn't really an explanation.
          • snowwrestler 8y ago
            I think it is instructive that while eBay was able to void the Craigslist poison pill provision in court, they have not been able to, for example, sue Craigslist into increasing revenue and profit by charging a per-listing fee on "for sale" items. To my knowledge eBay hasn't even tried that--no doubt because they know it would be futile. The practical question is not necessarily whether Craigslist has a duty to maximize shareholder value, but rather, to what extent can shareholders use the courts to second-guess the business decisions of corporate management? As the links in the Google search above attest, decades of precedent seems to suggest: almost no extent at all. To look at another high-profile example, Apple CEO Tim Cook--in a shareholders meeting!--said "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI. If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock." While it made some news, I don't recall a shareholder lawsuit forcing Tim out of Apple for refusing to maximize shareholder value.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• master-litty 8y ago
  But consider the company's perspective. If you're engaging in unethical behavior that has a market, and you want to stop the behavior, withdrawing from the market definitely doesn't stop it. It encourages a new player to step up and have an advantage over you, and worse, repeat that unethical behavior.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• zjaffee 8y ago
  Have you ever met Marc Benioff or anyone whose ever worked closely with him? It's pretty commonly believed among those who have that he wants to take some sort of political office at some point in the near future, and that's more important to him that continuing to expand Salesforce.
  • Amygaz 8y ago
    The bar is pretty low right now. Who hasn't recently entertained that idea, even one moment to go that route (which seems to be leading to Nowhereland).
  • ubertaco 8y ago
    s/Marc Benioff/Donald Trump/ and you'd see that this is not a defense or an indicator of any sort of good intent, it's just an unrelated bit of trivia.
    • sb8244 8y ago
      I think that the point being made is that he's saying this to position himself in such a way as having a politically mindful voice, which is relevant considering what he's saying.
• mmaunder 8y ago
  This is Benioff shutting the door behind him. It lets him seize the moral high ground, while making it more expensive for startups to try to imitate them. A few million bucks on navigating complex multi-jurisdictional compliance issues is nothing for them. It's a non-starter for a small team of innovators. Few things terrify incumbents more than a fast moving nimble and smart team of innovators. e.g. FB paying $19bn for WhatsApp.
  • Frondo 8y ago
    You know what? Fine. I don't care which incumbents will be okay in a world with better laws around privacy. I want better laws around privacy. And I give less than zero shits about any startup whose business model necessitates violating my privacy--if privacy laws create barriers to entry, that's absolutely fine. The rights to privacy that some new laws could give us is simply more important than that.
    • mmaunder 8y ago
      Hey I think we're all with you. You have to admit though, it is interesting watching the side-effects.
    • rosser 8y ago
      The concern seems to be less about creating barriers to entry than it is about entrenching incumbents. A legal regime that does the former without doing the latter? Sign me up. One that does both? Well, I guess I do still get privacy laws, but are they worth a damn if the latter is among their effects?
    • bkanber 8y ago
      It's not the privacy part of the law that's hard for companies. Most companies do not abuse your data. The GDPR is very expensive. Every data processing activity needs to be auditable, every customer relationship needs a data processing agreement (and each new custom one needs to be reviewed by legal), we now pay fees to all sorts of data protection authorities. On top of that, it forced us into a new, more expensive insurance policy.
• Operyl 8y ago
  > Set your browser to do not track - we respect this signal regardless of the presence of a cookie. Sounds like you have a fairly easy way to remain opted out. Either that or using the never ending amount of adblockers to block trackers specifically?
• vadym909 8y ago
  He's not saying companies can't keep a CRM system to keep track of leads and customers. What he means is the sneaky and hidden ways in which FB, Google and other advertising based tech companies track your every action on the web, create a profile for you without your explicit permission and selling that information or access to it to advertisers, etc.
  • slap_shot 8y ago
    Then you clearly don't know what Salesforce DMP is (the product I referenced in my OP) or what a DMP is. Research it and I think you'll have a better understanding of my comment.
• SilasX 8y ago
  "You know ... I make a lot of money from grazing my sheep on the commons[1], but it's really not sustainable to have this free-for-all. If everyone can just graze the grass with no restriction, the roots will get eaten up and there won't be a future stock to use. I propose that we segment it out so all the plots have an owner, who will have an incentive to limit grazing, and then compensate the people who lose their right to graze..." 'This is absolutely hilarious. This dude has a huge herd and makes a fortune selling sheep that were fattened from grazing the commons.' [1] Yes, I know that the story that the "tragedy of the commons" parable is based on is fake, and they actually had sensible customs to prevent the free-for-all; this is just for illustrative purposes.
• savanaly 8y ago
  Advertisement and info gathering beyond a certain point (which we probably passed long ago) is simply an arms race/prisoners dilemma. All the companies would be better off or at least no worse off if they all mutually scaled down their efforts, but it's to no one's advantage to scale down their own efforts. Why ridicule the players in a prisoners dilemma for trying to jointly move to a superior outcome?
• gxs 8y ago
  >>> This dude owns company that builds an array of products around identifying your users, storing as much information about them as possible I get where youre coming from and Salesforce does it's share of this, but they aren't Google or Facebook deriving most of their profit from user data. Their app is used mainly to drive and automate business process in a system that can serve the entire organization. A lot of business (the run the business part) run a very high percentage of their business on Salesforce - including some of the biggest companies in the world. They make their money from subscriptions, the appExchange, and services. I'm sure they collect data (and some of their marketing/lead generation software I'm sure collects data), but it might be a little much to say that the entire product is built around collecting user data. On top of that, Salesforce does a TON to portray themselves as an extremely liberal company - from diversity initiatives and minority outreach to widely marketing their charitable contributions. So at least on the surface they are consistent with their messaging. Not a shill - just sharing what I know from companies where I've worked that used salesforce in one way or another.
  • slap_shot 8y ago
    > Not a shill - just sharing what I know from companies where I've worked that used salesforce in one way or another. Right, and as I've told others, you either don't know what Salesforce DMP is or you don't know what a DMP is. To say Salesforce's only offering is the CRM aspect of their product is just wrong.
    • gxs 8y ago
      No need to get into the you don’t know this or don’t understand that, man. I’ve done my share of implementations and marketing cloud is just one of their product groupings and it isn’t even the one that is used the most. In fact, most organizations (esp big ones) usually have differential tools for the marketing piece. They offer other data services, but again even in orgs that have purchased them I haven’t seen them used that much. There are so many other parts of Salesforce that are extensively used outside of marketing, that I’m not sure how their crm is not the main thing. I even said I’m my post that they definitely do the data collecting etc, just that it’s not their primary source of revenue like fb et al.
• ma2rten 8y ago
  Actually they probably have this button or they are adding it very soon, because it is required in Europe under GDPR.
• realandreskytt 8y ago
  This only applies, if you treat privacy as limiting information collected. If you take the view that privacy is a peocess integrity issue instead (all data is effectively personal, the goal is to make sure access to it is transparent and restricted) him asking for such law makes much more sense
• throwaway48582 8y ago
  Salesforce is working on it. It's not an easy undertaking even for a large company.