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Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

223 points by petethomas 8y ago

thinkingkong 8y ago
Seems like this would all boil down to knowledge and intent. I have no love for salesforce but it seems like a big of a stretch to go after a tools manufacturer.
- wl 8y ago
  There's a term for this kind of thing: deep pocket. The folks actually responsible for the wrongs these people have suffered are likely imprisoned and are relatively poor compared to Salesforce.
- LanceH 8y ago
  As a tools provider, sure, it makes no sense. But aren't they also a big services company as well, like Oracle? Will there be some record of an engagement on how to manage these particular pages? And it would also be nice of "journalists" would differentiate between prostitution and sex trafficking. The cops, of course, are using the most inflammatory term possible to justify their actions.
  - save_ferris 8y ago
    > And it would also be nice of "journalists" would differentiate between prostitution and sex trafficking. The cops, of course, are using the most inflammatory term possible to justify their actions. This is a civil suit, not criminal, brought by women who claimed they were abused by traffickers, which was enabled by Salesforce. I can't find a single reference to the police in this piece, and the article clearly states that the plaintiffs allege trafficking in their case. So the piece is exactly correct to use the term "trafficking".
- muzani 8y ago
  It's not just "tools". It's closer to service, as they would have been aware taking money from a shady company. It seems similar to banks participating in money laundering. They could well have guessed what it was for, but closed an eye to it. The case really boils down to proving that they had good knowledge of what was going on.
pferde 8y ago
I wonder whom did Salesforce annoy enough to warrant a media smear campaign against them.
- outside1234 8y ago
  The people that were the raw materials of the sex trafficing.
  - MiroF 8y ago
    No don't you see? It's obviously a feminist conspiracy /s since it can be hard to tell on this site
    - steveeq1 8y ago
      HN is a fairly socially liberal site.
      - MiroF 8y ago
        Not on gender issues it isn't. It's what happens when a space is very predominately male
  - pferde 8y ago
    Touche.
- canthonytucci 8y ago
  anyone who's ever had to build anything on it. but yeah this smells like an attack.
  - zwkrt 8y ago
    Is Apex still a thing? When I was at my first internship that environment was one of the only things that has ever made me consider quitting programming.
koboll 8y ago
It's impossible to evaluate the legitimacy of this without more technical details. "Providing customized database tools" could mean all sorts of things.
- ineedasername 8y ago
  I would think they'd need to demonstrate that Saleforce knew that Backpage engaged in illegal practices. Considering that anyone can signup for Saleforce through an automated system and begin using it, this would be difficult. It would be like trying to go after google because Backpage used gmail.
- mcguire 8y ago
  Salesforce allegedly helped them with their "trafficker and pimp database". On one hand, that's Salesforce doing their job well. On the other, seems like they would know what's going on.
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    I mean, I doubt the criminals are using HUMAN_TRAFFIC_ROUTE and PIMP_QUOTA as column names. Past a certain point the logistics of a criminal enterprise looks just as generic as any other corp; It's kinda easy to see how Salesforce could be fooled
  - Kalium 8y ago
    That would depend a great deal on what the database looked like. A "trafficker and pimp database" could easily look like any other CRM contact list.
  - koboll 8y ago
    That would almost certainly require them to be snooping on their customers' data, which would be a whole other scandal.
redm 8y ago
I think the lesson here, is that by putting themselves out there as a beacon of equality and women's rights, Benioff has also made them a target for this type of attack. In other words, no good deed goes unpunished. I'm sure there were plenty of other vendors supporting Backpage.
knotdeven 8y ago
Big data will be used to identify, track, isolate, and then indoctrinate the most vulnerable members of society. You will be shadow banned and gas lit into a pipeline that serves to supply the insidious demands of those who see humans only as resources. We coders will unwittingly(poorly compensated) or wittingly(well compensated) algorithmically functionalize the pimp psychology and business practice into a system of sinister use. For now it's just immigrants driving cars and delivering food, but you might guess what comes next.
- deleted 8y ago
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- europsucks 8y ago
  Really? What is there even to exploit, apart from such rather extreme cases as this alleged sex trafficking? You really think the main use of BIG data will be to facilitate things like sex trafficking? As for immigrants delivering food - would they be better off without these jobs? What would they be doing?
- calimac 8y ago
  Beautiful description of whats happening. Few can see what you describe through their lense of bias and rationalization
  - knotdeven 8y ago
    There's an algorithm out there looking for girls who don't ever get phone calls or texts from their dads...
mcguire 8y ago
"Starting in 2013, when Backpage’s growth stalled, Salesforce took on the web portal as a client and provided tools to help manage its “trafficker and pimp database,” resulting in Backpage’s resurgence, according to the complaint. The lawsuit includes an order form billed to Backpage that’s dated in December 2016."
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hajile 8y ago
Should we also allow Microsoft to be sued for all the criminals that use windows? Salesforce is a platform (albeit a horrible one I never want to work with again) and provides services to whoever pays. Illegal actions are between the local government and the user. Criminals lie. They could claim to be a humanitarian company while trafficking. The only way for Salesforce to know would be to manually investigate all their stored data. Not only is that practically impossible, but it would also ruin them. Business information is private. Then again, in lots of jurisdictions today, a landlord can be held liable for the tenant committing a crime. In these jurisdictions, if your tenant assaults someone on your property, you can be liable for millions in compensation. This is yet another way to drive former criminals back to crime. They aren't full citizens. They can't get a job to get money. They can't get a loan to buy a house. They can't even rent a place to stay because it's so risky. Since they've been effectively "unperson-ed", their only choice is going back to crime. At least if they're caught, they'll have food, healthcare, and a place to stay. Stupid laws are stupid. If person A is legally responsible for person B's actions, they will necessarily start asserting control over person B's life. We do this to kids under the idea that they are too ignorant to know better. Why do we do this to mentally-capable adults? They are capable of independent decisions. Hold them responsible for their actions. Quit forcing Landlords, Salesforce, or whomever to play as parents and be legally responsible for other adults.
- leroy_masochist 8y ago
  > Should we also allow Microsoft to be sued for all the criminals that use windows? No, but what is hinted at in the complaint is that Salesforce did some kind of custom integration for Backpage: > The women sued Salesforce Tuesday in San Francisco state court, claiming billionaire Marc Benioff’s company knowingly supported Backpage by providing customized database tools to market and remarket prostitutes to “pimps, johns and traffickers who had been underusing its trafficking services.” I'm no lawyer but I imagine the crux of this is whether Salesforce actually did meaningfully custom integrations for this. If their team's interaction with Backpage was limited to, "hey I'd like to buy 10 seats" "sure that'll be $#,### per seat per year" I have a hard time understanding where there was true wrongdoing on Salesforce's part, aside from maybe a lack of situational awareness of what Backpage was. If on the other hand they were actually building features designed to help Backpage keep more pimps on the platform (not sure what that would look like for pimps specifically vs. other Salesforce use cases, but just hypothetically) then yeah that would be really really bad. It is kind of surprising this is happening....Marc Benioff makes a big show of being woke, and activist-journalists with a big audience such as Nick Kristof at the NYT have been writing about how bad Backpage is (was) since 2012-ish. You would think this one wouldn't get past Compliance.
milemi 8y ago
Since it wasn't mentioned in the bloomberg article, whoever has been paying attention knows that shutting down backpage has made sex workers less safe and more dependent on pimps. Prostitution should be completely legal and brought into the light, not pushed into the shadows.
- dmos62 8y ago
  A very good presentation on the topic, by an activist with the Sex Worker Open University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJRBx0JjM_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJRBx0JjM_M Even if I had found the content uninteresting, I would have still watched through the whole thing because of how well written I found it.
- prolepunk 8y ago
  Now that shutting down backpage made the hardline stance on the issue mainstream, this lawsuit is one consequence of that.
- Pharmakon 8y ago
  The issue of sex work seems only tangentially related to human trafficking. Prostitution should be legal (and regulated), but human trafficking really shouldn’t be.
  - dyeje 8y ago
    ~80% of human trafficking victims are sexually exploited [1]. So that seems alot more than tangential. I don't think anyone is arguing that human trafficking should be legal. [1] https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-report-on-trafficking-in-persons.html https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-repo...
  - gimmeThaBeet 8y ago
    The argument is that if a reasonable legal market exists to do things, there's less incentive for the dangerous/harmful ways to do things, hopefully to the point its not worth it. And I hope its fair to say that criminals are in the business of trading risk of arrest/harm for money, and an overwhelming majority of trafficking is for that purpose. I'm not saying you'll fix it overnight, people still smuggle cigarettes as a form of tax arbitrage, but changing the market incentives absolutely has an effect on behavior.
gonational 8y ago
PG&E could be in trouble... First, that big Camp fire last year; now, if it turns out they’ve been producing electricity that has been used by criminals... eek
sperber2999 8y ago
I am most certain SF had no idea what was going on, and while any form of abuse is horrible it makes no sense accusing SF of helping in a crime where it's impossible for SF to know. It's like blaming a lawn gnome maker for somebody being beaten with a lawn gnome. Demanding SF monitors everything, or Google monintors all mails, to prevent criminal activity is causing more overall harm for society than those edge cases do. If not SF they could have used every other CRM with ease, I suppose, but SF, Google et al turning into the panopticon would harm everybody.
nraynaud 8y ago
“I just bought the prostitution module for my ERP, I hope it integrate well with accounting and procurement” I am really curious as to how the developers justify taking this kind of gig.
- sethaurus 8y ago
  This case is specifically about sex trafficking, which is coercive and distinct from prostitution. If you're asserting that sex-work is inherently unethical, and that developers have an obligation not to lend their services to it, you need to make that case.
  - briandear 8y ago
    Sex trafficking isn’t distinct from prostitution in practice. Human trafficking is part of the prostitution supply chain.
    - Macross8299 8y ago
      > Human trafficking is part of the prostitution supply chain. Is that an inherent fact of prostitution or a function of prostitution's dubious legal status? One could make similar arguments about ultra-violent criminal cartels and marijuana in the past. "Smoking cannabis isn't distinct from funding Los Zetas in practice"
      - Jolter 8y ago
        There are indications that the illegal status of prostitution does not in fact contribute to more trafficking, but the opposite. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/45198/1/Neumayer_Legalized_Prostitution_Increase_2012.pdf http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/45198/1/Neumayer_Legalized_Prostitu... "This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over trafficked ones. Our empirical analysis for a cross-section of up to 150 countries shows that the scale effect dominates the substitution effect. On average, countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows. "
peterwwillis 8y ago
On the one hand, they're probably not going to be seriously held accountable for supporting sex trafficking. Best case, the CEO gets uprooted, or they get a menial fine. Legislation to support bigger consequences would be great. On the other hand, SESTA/FOSTA has had a chilling effect on any sexuality on any platform in the US. There's Facebook events for burlesque shows that are being removed by Facebook because the word "sexy" is included in the description. And non-profits that try to promote safer sex, support people in abusive relationships, etc are removed from social media or have their websites revoked because they have "sex" in the title. Where's the middle ground? How can we create consequences for companies that act unethically without them then banishing all sex-related content?
- guitarbill 8y ago
  By not making laws based on moral outrage but pragmatism. In countries where sex work/drugs/etc are legal - or at least decriminalised - it isn't necessarily done because the majority feel this is the right thing to do, but because of harm reduction after consulting with experts in the field. Similarly, if you want less dead schoolchildren, this one weird trick of highly regulating firearms seems to work. Also, there are other legal avenues, see OJ Simpson's criminal vs civil trials (edit: this trial is a civil one. Not everything that is wrong has to be a crime to be punished, and not every court system has to work by the letter of the law like the US does.
- sethaurus 8y ago
  The middle ground is to draw a clear distinction, both socially and legally, between sex and abuse. The criminalization of prostitution only muddies this line, and FOSTA-SESTA has served to marginalize and endanger both sex workers and sex-adjacent industries.
seppin 8y ago
It's a modern IBM punchcard case.
- Macross8299 8y ago
  Seems like a bit of a leap to compare enabling prostitution (something that ~50% of Americans think should be legal [0]) to enabling industrialized mass murder and genocide. Backpage definitely enabled trafficking in some cases knowingly or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it made sex work safer in other cases. [0] https://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000121 https://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID...
olivermarks 8y ago
Craigslist would have been shut down if they hadn't closed down their 'lonely hearts' section. Backpage was essentially a craigslist clone right down to look and feel and allowed prostitution advertising, which was the main substance and content of that site until they were closed down. This is another difficult free speech and enabling platform 'responsibility' area which is easily exploitable by both criminals (human traffickers etc) and exploiters of the law's grey areas (Those suing SalesForce). Like the Michael Jackson accusers there is a danger that widely circulated accusations presented as fact by the corporate media will greatly damage SalesForce's credibility. huge sums of money as compensation/hush money are at stake and there is much to gain and little to risk for accusers in the current climate.
- GVIrish 8y ago
  To be clear, Backpage didn't get shut down for merely hosting prostitution ads. They got shut down for actively editing ads featuring minors to remove references to their age, money laundering, purposefully not reporting missing and exploited children, and few other things that showed they were not just a neutral party displaying ads.
  - olivermarks 8y ago
    https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investigations/2018/08/25/backpage-founders-prostitution-charges-settling-scores-michael-lacey-james-larkin/1097236002/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga... as always it's complicated when free speech issues are involved
vstuart 8y ago
This 6* Min. clip (gender equality in the workplace) with Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff is outstanding and apropos to this thread. Benioff is reassuringly pro-equality (women's rights advocate). https://persagen.com/files/misc/benioff.mp4 https://persagen.com/files/misc/benioff.mp4 ------------------------------ Aside: for the techies here, in 2016 Salesforce purchased (Richard Socher's) MetaMind ... a superb group who continue to publish leading edge NLP/NLU papers ... https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/04/saleforce-acquires-metamind/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/04/saleforce-acquires-metamin... https://www.recode.net/2016/4/4/11585854/salesforce-acquisition-metamind-deep-learning https://www.recode.net/2016/4/4/11585854/salesforce-acquisit... Very forward-thinking.
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zebnyc 8y ago
Unless Salesforce was doing a custom deployment for them, this kind of revisionism is a non-story IMHO. Just to give context, I work at an adtech company and to be eligible to speak to an account manager, the customer has to spend upwards of 10 grand a month. Rest are self-served. We dropped Infowars as a customer `after` we got to know that they had been a customer for a while. Would not be surprised if Salesforce has similar tiers and has magnitude more customers than we do.
luxuryballs 8y ago
evil people can use money for evil, does that make money evil and thus we should avoid having money? then only evil people would have all the money evil people can use guns for evil, does that make guns evil? evil comes from the heart into the hand and into the tool if we demonize the tool then we surrender it entirely to evil
superkuh 8y ago
The entire 'sex trafficking' thing is a manufactured moral drama. It doesn't actually exist at scale. All the large 'sex trafficking' courts set up a few years ago have now closed due to lack of cases. This is just the normal government/media cycle of using kids and/or sex in order to pass laws (ie, FOSTA/SESTA) to violate the rights of individuals and empower the state.
aznpwnzor 8y ago
You can't claim to be as a Service if you don't want all the downsides associated with it. You can sell tools as is (not as a service), and if it is used for nefarious purposes, your hands are morally and legally clean. you can seek to make that specific tool illegal, but until then, everything's fair game, e.g. you can try to ban automatic weapons but you can't charge companies for selling them.
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ta1548177231 8y ago
If this goes through, then condom manufacturers are in big trouble.
pythonicraps 8y ago
This is very different from Apple or Microsoft (assuming they had iphones / windows laptops), they are B2C and are not managing individual customer relationships. Salesforce is a B2B company and actively manages every relationship that they have with every individual customer, because lots of their customers are businesses that are willing to pay $10K/yr, $100k/yr or even $1M+/yr for their cloud products (why? the world may never know). This means that "Customer Success Managers" are constantly reaching out to Salesforce's customers to up-sell them. Anyone who works with Salesforce knows that the salesforce folks are constantly schmoozing their customers for an up-sell. This report shows that Backpage was no exception. So people at Salesforce were emailing, calling, customizing software for, taking out to lunch and making deals with a company selling child sex slaves online. They knew and took the money anyways.

223 points by petethomas 8y ago

Seems like this would all boil down to knowledge and intent. I have no love for salesforce but it seems like a big of a stretch to go after a tools manufacturer.

wl 8y ago
There's a term for this kind of thing: deep pocket. The folks actually responsible for the wrongs these people have suffered are likely imprisoned and are relatively poor compared to Salesforce.
LanceH 8y ago
As a tools provider, sure, it makes no sense. But aren't they also a big services company as well, like Oracle? Will there be some record of an engagement on how to manage these particular pages? And it would also be nice of "journalists" would differentiate between prostitution and sex trafficking. The cops, of course, are using the most inflammatory term possible to justify their actions.
- save_ferris 8y ago
  > And it would also be nice of "journalists" would differentiate between prostitution and sex trafficking. The cops, of course, are using the most inflammatory term possible to justify their actions. This is a civil suit, not criminal, brought by women who claimed they were abused by traffickers, which was enabled by Salesforce. I can't find a single reference to the police in this piece, and the article clearly states that the plaintiffs allege trafficking in their case. So the piece is exactly correct to use the term "trafficking".
muzani 8y ago
It's not just "tools". It's closer to service, as they would have been aware taking money from a shady company. It seems similar to banks participating in money laundering. They could well have guessed what it was for, but closed an eye to it. The case really boils down to proving that they had good knowledge of what was going on.

pferde 8y ago

I wonder whom did Salesforce annoy enough to warrant a media smear campaign against them.

outside1234 8y ago
The people that were the raw materials of the sex trafficing.
- MiroF 8y ago
  No don't you see? It's obviously a feminist conspiracy /s since it can be hard to tell on this site
  - steveeq1 8y ago
    HN is a fairly socially liberal site.
    - MiroF 8y ago
      Not on gender issues it isn't. It's what happens when a space is very predominately male
- pferde 8y ago
  Touche.
canthonytucci 8y ago
anyone who's ever had to build anything on it. but yeah this smells like an attack.
- zwkrt 8y ago
  Is Apex still a thing? When I was at my first internship that environment was one of the only things that has ever made me consider quitting programming.

koboll 8y ago

It's impossible to evaluate the legitimacy of this without more technical details. "Providing customized database tools" could mean all sorts of things.

ineedasername 8y ago
I would think they'd need to demonstrate that Saleforce knew that Backpage engaged in illegal practices. Considering that anyone can signup for Saleforce through an automated system and begin using it, this would be difficult. It would be like trying to go after google because Backpage used gmail.
mcguire 8y ago
Salesforce allegedly helped them with their "trafficker and pimp database". On one hand, that's Salesforce doing their job well. On the other, seems like they would know what's going on.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  I mean, I doubt the criminals are using HUMAN_TRAFFIC_ROUTE and PIMP_QUOTA as column names. Past a certain point the logistics of a criminal enterprise looks just as generic as any other corp; It's kinda easy to see how Salesforce could be fooled
- Kalium 8y ago
  That would depend a great deal on what the database looked like. A "trafficker and pimp database" could easily look like any other CRM contact list.
- koboll 8y ago
  That would almost certainly require them to be snooping on their customers' data, which would be a whole other scandal.

redm 8y ago

I think the lesson here, is that by putting themselves out there as a beacon of equality and women's rights, Benioff has also made them a target for this type of attack. In other words, no good deed goes unpunished. I'm sure there were plenty of other vendors supporting Backpage.

knotdeven 8y ago

Big data will be used to identify, track, isolate, and then indoctrinate the most vulnerable members of society. You will be shadow banned and gas lit into a pipeline that serves to supply the insidious demands of those who see humans only as resources. We coders will unwittingly(poorly compensated) or wittingly(well compensated) algorithmically functionalize the pimp psychology and business practice into a system of sinister use. For now it's just immigrants driving cars and delivering food, but you might guess what comes next.

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europsucks 8y ago
Really? What is there even to exploit, apart from such rather extreme cases as this alleged sex trafficking? You really think the main use of BIG data will be to facilitate things like sex trafficking? As for immigrants delivering food - would they be better off without these jobs? What would they be doing?
calimac 8y ago
Beautiful description of whats happening. Few can see what you describe through their lense of bias and rationalization
- knotdeven 8y ago
  There's an algorithm out there looking for girls who don't ever get phone calls or texts from their dads...

mcguire 8y ago

"Starting in 2013, when Backpage’s growth stalled, Salesforce took on the web portal as a client and provided tools to help manage its “trafficker and pimp database,” resulting in Backpage’s resurgence, according to the complaint. The lawsuit includes an order form billed to Backpage that’s dated in December 2016."

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hajile 8y ago

Should we also allow Microsoft to be sued for all the criminals that use windows? Salesforce is a platform (albeit a horrible one I never want to work with again) and provides services to whoever pays. Illegal actions are between the local government and the user. Criminals lie. They could claim to be a humanitarian company while trafficking. The only way for Salesforce to know would be to manually investigate all their stored data. Not only is that practically impossible, but it would also ruin them. Business information is private. Then again, in lots of jurisdictions today, a landlord can be held liable for the tenant committing a crime. In these jurisdictions, if your tenant assaults someone on your property, you can be liable for millions in compensation. This is yet another way to drive former criminals back to crime. They aren't full citizens. They can't get a job to get money. They can't get a loan to buy a house. They can't even rent a place to stay because it's so risky. Since they've been effectively "unperson-ed", their only choice is going back to crime. At least if they're caught, they'll have food, healthcare, and a place to stay. Stupid laws are stupid. If person A is legally responsible for person B's actions, they will necessarily start asserting control over person B's life. We do this to kids under the idea that they are too ignorant to know better. Why do we do this to mentally-capable adults? They are capable of independent decisions. Hold them responsible for their actions. Quit forcing Landlords, Salesforce, or whomever to play as parents and be legally responsible for other adults.

leroy_masochist 8y ago
> Should we also allow Microsoft to be sued for all the criminals that use windows? No, but what is hinted at in the complaint is that Salesforce did some kind of custom integration for Backpage: > The women sued Salesforce Tuesday in San Francisco state court, claiming billionaire Marc Benioff’s company knowingly supported Backpage by providing customized database tools to market and remarket prostitutes to “pimps, johns and traffickers who had been underusing its trafficking services.” I'm no lawyer but I imagine the crux of this is whether Salesforce actually did meaningfully custom integrations for this. If their team's interaction with Backpage was limited to, "hey I'd like to buy 10 seats" "sure that'll be $#,### per seat per year" I have a hard time understanding where there was true wrongdoing on Salesforce's part, aside from maybe a lack of situational awareness of what Backpage was. If on the other hand they were actually building features designed to help Backpage keep more pimps on the platform (not sure what that would look like for pimps specifically vs. other Salesforce use cases, but just hypothetically) then yeah that would be really really bad. It is kind of surprising this is happening....Marc Benioff makes a big show of being woke, and activist-journalists with a big audience such as Nick Kristof at the NYT have been writing about how bad Backpage is (was) since 2012-ish. You would think this one wouldn't get past Compliance.

milemi 8y ago

Since it wasn't mentioned in the bloomberg article, whoever has been paying attention knows that shutting down backpage has made sex workers less safe and more dependent on pimps. Prostitution should be completely legal and brought into the light, not pushed into the shadows.

dmos62 8y ago
A very good presentation on the topic, by an activist with the Sex Worker Open University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJRBx0JjM_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJRBx0JjM_M Even if I had found the content uninteresting, I would have still watched through the whole thing because of how well written I found it.
prolepunk 8y ago
Now that shutting down backpage made the hardline stance on the issue mainstream, this lawsuit is one consequence of that.
Pharmakon 8y ago
The issue of sex work seems only tangentially related to human trafficking. Prostitution should be legal (and regulated), but human trafficking really shouldn’t be.
- dyeje 8y ago
  ~80% of human trafficking victims are sexually exploited [1]. So that seems alot more than tangential. I don't think anyone is arguing that human trafficking should be legal. [1] https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-report-on-trafficking-in-persons.html https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-repo...
- gimmeThaBeet 8y ago
  The argument is that if a reasonable legal market exists to do things, there's less incentive for the dangerous/harmful ways to do things, hopefully to the point its not worth it. And I hope its fair to say that criminals are in the business of trading risk of arrest/harm for money, and an overwhelming majority of trafficking is for that purpose. I'm not saying you'll fix it overnight, people still smuggle cigarettes as a form of tax arbitrage, but changing the market incentives absolutely has an effect on behavior.

gonational 8y ago

PG&E could be in trouble... First, that big Camp fire last year; now, if it turns out they’ve been producing electricity that has been used by criminals... eek

sperber2999 8y ago

I am most certain SF had no idea what was going on, and while any form of abuse is horrible it makes no sense accusing SF of helping in a crime where it's impossible for SF to know. It's like blaming a lawn gnome maker for somebody being beaten with a lawn gnome. Demanding SF monitors everything, or Google monintors all mails, to prevent criminal activity is causing more overall harm for society than those edge cases do. If not SF they could have used every other CRM with ease, I suppose, but SF, Google et al turning into the panopticon would harm everybody.

nraynaud 8y ago

“I just bought the prostitution module for my ERP, I hope it integrate well with accounting and procurement” I am really curious as to how the developers justify taking this kind of gig.

sethaurus 8y ago
This case is specifically about sex trafficking, which is coercive and distinct from prostitution. If you're asserting that sex-work is inherently unethical, and that developers have an obligation not to lend their services to it, you need to make that case.
- briandear 8y ago
  Sex trafficking isn’t distinct from prostitution in practice. Human trafficking is part of the prostitution supply chain.
  - Macross8299 8y ago
    > Human trafficking is part of the prostitution supply chain. Is that an inherent fact of prostitution or a function of prostitution's dubious legal status? One could make similar arguments about ultra-violent criminal cartels and marijuana in the past. "Smoking cannabis isn't distinct from funding Los Zetas in practice"
    - Jolter 8y ago
      There are indications that the illegal status of prostitution does not in fact contribute to more trafficking, but the opposite. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/45198/1/Neumayer_Legalized_Prostitution_Increase_2012.pdf http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/45198/1/Neumayer_Legalized_Prostitu... "This paper investigates the impact of legalized prostitution on human trafficking inflows. According to economic theory, there are two opposing effects of unknown magnitude. The scale effect of legalized prostitution leads to an expansion of the prostitution market, increasing human trafficking, while the substitution effect reduces demand for trafficked women as legal prostitutes are favored over trafficked ones. Our empirical analysis for a cross-section of up to 150 countries shows that the scale effect dominates the substitution effect. On average, countries where prostitution is legal experience larger reported human trafficking inflows. "

peterwwillis 8y ago

On the one hand, they're probably not going to be seriously held accountable for supporting sex trafficking. Best case, the CEO gets uprooted, or they get a menial fine. Legislation to support bigger consequences would be great. On the other hand, SESTA/FOSTA has had a chilling effect on any sexuality on any platform in the US. There's Facebook events for burlesque shows that are being removed by Facebook because the word "sexy" is included in the description. And non-profits that try to promote safer sex, support people in abusive relationships, etc are removed from social media or have their websites revoked because they have "sex" in the title. Where's the middle ground? How can we create consequences for companies that act unethically without them then banishing all sex-related content?

guitarbill 8y ago
By not making laws based on moral outrage but pragmatism. In countries where sex work/drugs/etc are legal - or at least decriminalised - it isn't necessarily done because the majority feel this is the right thing to do, but because of harm reduction after consulting with experts in the field. Similarly, if you want less dead schoolchildren, this one weird trick of highly regulating firearms seems to work. Also, there are other legal avenues, see OJ Simpson's criminal vs civil trials (edit: this trial is a civil one. Not everything that is wrong has to be a crime to be punished, and not every court system has to work by the letter of the law like the US does.
sethaurus 8y ago
The middle ground is to draw a clear distinction, both socially and legally, between sex and abuse. The criminalization of prostitution only muddies this line, and FOSTA-SESTA has served to marginalize and endanger both sex workers and sex-adjacent industries.

seppin 8y ago

It's a modern IBM punchcard case.

Macross8299 8y ago
Seems like a bit of a leap to compare enabling prostitution (something that ~50% of Americans think should be legal [0]) to enabling industrialized mass murder and genocide. Backpage definitely enabled trafficking in some cases knowingly or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it made sex work safer in other cases. [0] https://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=000121 https://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID...

olivermarks 8y ago

Craigslist would have been shut down if they hadn't closed down their 'lonely hearts' section. Backpage was essentially a craigslist clone right down to look and feel and allowed prostitution advertising, which was the main substance and content of that site until they were closed down. This is another difficult free speech and enabling platform 'responsibility' area which is easily exploitable by both criminals (human traffickers etc) and exploiters of the law's grey areas (Those suing SalesForce). Like the Michael Jackson accusers there is a danger that widely circulated accusations presented as fact by the corporate media will greatly damage SalesForce's credibility. huge sums of money as compensation/hush money are at stake and there is much to gain and little to risk for accusers in the current climate.

GVIrish 8y ago
To be clear, Backpage didn't get shut down for merely hosting prostitution ads. They got shut down for actively editing ads featuring minors to remove references to their age, money laundering, purposefully not reporting missing and exploited children, and few other things that showed they were not just a neutral party displaying ads.
- olivermarks 8y ago
  https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investigations/2018/08/25/backpage-founders-prostitution-charges-settling-scores-michael-lacey-james-larkin/1097236002/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga... as always it's complicated when free speech issues are involved

vstuart 8y ago

This 6* Min. clip (gender equality in the workplace) with Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff is outstanding and apropos to this thread. Benioff is reassuringly pro-equality (women's rights advocate). https://persagen.com/files/misc/benioff.mp4 https://persagen.com/files/misc/benioff.mp4 ------------------------------ Aside: for the techies here, in 2016 Salesforce purchased (Richard Socher's) MetaMind ... a superb group who continue to publish leading edge NLP/NLU papers ... https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/04/saleforce-acquires-metamind/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/04/saleforce-acquires-metamin... https://www.recode.net/2016/4/4/11585854/salesforce-acquisition-metamind-deep-learning https://www.recode.net/2016/4/4/11585854/salesforce-acquisit... Very forward-thinking.

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zebnyc 8y ago

Unless Salesforce was doing a custom deployment for them, this kind of revisionism is a non-story IMHO. Just to give context, I work at an adtech company and to be eligible to speak to an account manager, the customer has to spend upwards of 10 grand a month. Rest are self-served. We dropped Infowars as a customer `after` we got to know that they had been a customer for a while. Would not be surprised if Salesforce has similar tiers and has magnitude more customers than we do.

luxuryballs 8y ago

evil people can use money for evil, does that make money evil and thus we should avoid having money? then only evil people would have all the money evil people can use guns for evil, does that make guns evil? evil comes from the heart into the hand and into the tool if we demonize the tool then we surrender it entirely to evil

superkuh 8y ago

The entire 'sex trafficking' thing is a manufactured moral drama. It doesn't actually exist at scale. All the large 'sex trafficking' courts set up a few years ago have now closed due to lack of cases. This is just the normal government/media cycle of using kids and/or sex in order to pass laws (ie, FOSTA/SESTA) to violate the rights of individuals and empower the state.

aznpwnzor 8y ago

You can't claim to be as a Service if you don't want all the downsides associated with it. You can sell tools as is (not as a service), and if it is used for nefarious purposes, your hands are morally and legally clean. you can seek to make that specific tool illegal, but until then, everything's fair game, e.g. you can try to ban automatic weapons but you can't charge companies for selling them.

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ta1548177231 8y ago

If this goes through, then condom manufacturers are in big trouble.

pythonicraps 8y ago

This is very different from Apple or Microsoft (assuming they had iphones / windows laptops), they are B2C and are not managing individual customer relationships. Salesforce is a B2B company and actively manages every relationship that they have with every individual customer, because lots of their customers are businesses that are willing to pay $10K/yr, $100k/yr or even $1M+/yr for their cloud products (why? the world may never know). This means that "Customer Success Managers" are constantly reaching out to Salesforce's customers to up-sell them. Anyone who works with Salesforce knows that the salesforce folks are constantly schmoozing their customers for an up-sell. This report shows that Backpage was no exception. So people at Salesforce were emailing, calling, customizing software for, taking out to lunch and making deals with a company selling child sex slaves online. They knew and took the money anyways.