Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them • Hacker News Board

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#151

Post by JamesBarney » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:52 PM UTC

hajile wrote: post #58

will_brown wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Should we also allow Microsoft to be sued for all the criminals that use windows? If a company provides products/services to someone with the knowledge those products/services will be used for a crime...then yes. For example it’s legal for an arms dealer to sell a gun, but illegal to sell a gun if the seller knows the gun is being purchased with the intent of being used in a crime. Here what you have is Salesforce w…

A bunch of Salesforce devs are hired to work on a human trafficking site. Do they all shrug and keep working? Or does Salesforce perhaps keep a special team of devs who are happy to participate in illegal actions? I doubt the conspiracy angle here and think someone would have talked. Either the site as coded didn't have any apparent links to trafficking or Salesforce didn't participate beyond some unknowing consultat…

I've never been but from what I've read it's best to think of Backpage as a Cragislist circa 2015. It allowed for a bunch of different types of posts but charged and made the majority of their income from their adult section.

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#152

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

will_brown wrote: post #108

belorn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually missed that they did say a date, which is... After the police seized Backpage in April 2018. "The company is helping to sponsor an anti-human-trafficking event in April" It also said its nonprofit arm spotlighted groups that worked on the front lines of the issue in 2017, which could be said to be PR campaign but it is stretching the meaning of a PR campaign a bit. "The lawsuit includes an order form billed…

I don’t think I said salesforce did the PR campaign before their business dealings. It’s also not a legal requirement of the claims (it’s just facts that play well to a jury). The threshold legal issue is did salesforce know or should SF have known their goods/products were being used by backpage to facilitate human trafficking/prostitution.

[deleted]

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#153

Post by olivermarks » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

GVIrish wrote: post #128

olivermarks wrote: post #66

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 (hum…

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.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...

as always it's complicated when free speech issues are involved

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#154

Post by sctb » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

anoncoward111 wrote: post #93

JamesBarney wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craigslist also had an adult section. Should anyone who sold software to Craigslist be held legally responsible as well?

It's like know your customer laws, but for everything ! Are you a grocery store that sells food to a potential jaywalker? You better find out!!

We've asked you many times to please post substantively, and since this is still an issue we've banned the account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and commit to following the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#155

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #132

hajile wrote: post #22

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 th…

> Then again, in lots of jurisdictions today, a landlord can be held liable for the tenant committing a crime. Whoa, is that true? Can you give a citation for that? That seems insane to me.

[deleted]

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#156

Post by DoreenMichele » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:03 PM UTC

milemi wrote: post #115

nabnob wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full legalization increases trafficking and allows brothels, which are basically pimps who are able to operate legally. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/45198/1/Neumayer_Legalized_Prostitu... The Nordic Model - decriminalization of selling, with criminalization of purchasing - protects sex workers from pimps and has been very successful in the countries that have instituted it.

Human trafficking is just another word for illegal immigration. It just sounds more sinister and it gives a way for anti-immigration folks to sound humane and pretend like they care about the trafficked people, when they really care about not letting them in. As long as you have inescapable poverty and hardship in some countries, and no legal ways for people to get in, you'll have human trafficking. The only way to s…

Human trafficking is just another word for illegal immigration.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking

"Human trafficking is the trade of humans for the purpose of forced labour, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. This may encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the extraction of organs or tissues, including for surrogacy and ova removal. Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the victim's rights of movement through coercion and because of their commercial exploitation. Human trafficking is the trade in people, especially women and children, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the person from one place to another."

Please take special note of the last sentence.

There are certainly jobs with higher inherent risks, like working in lumber, or oil rigs, or construction.

This line irks me, though I don't know how to clearly articulate why.

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#157

Post by praneshp » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

tarsinge wrote: post #31

Kaveren wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are complaining about someone donating to a children's hospital and being credited for it?

Not talking about Benioff but yes I can complain. If you are very wealthy you have to contribute back to society, that's not a thing to admire but to require. And if you donate only a small percent of your wealth, say 1%, I don't think you deserve more credit than anybody having a net worth of $10k donating $100, in fact maybe less, even if the absolute amount is way more.

> I don't think you deserve more credit than anybody having a net worth of $10k donating $100

Well $100 isn't worth shit in the big picture, so no, contributing millions is objectively more useful than contributing $100

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#158

Post by hackinthebochs » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

nabnob wrote: post #90

milemi wrote: post #27

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.

Full legalization increases trafficking and allows brothels, which are basically pimps who are able to operate legally. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/45198/1/Neumayer_Legalized_Prostitu... The Nordic Model - decriminalization of selling, with criminalization of purchasing - protects sex workers from pimps and has been very successful in the countries that have instituted it.

That paper's methodology doesn't attempt to distinguish between increases in total amount of trafficking vs increases in destination of trafficking victims. As an argument against legalization, it's pretty weak.

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#159

Post by will_brown » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

smallgovt wrote: post #137

will_brown wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Should we also allow Microsoft to be sued for all the criminals that use windows? If a company provides products/services to someone with the knowledge those products/services will be used for a crime...then yes. For example it’s legal for an arms dealer to sell a gun, but illegal to sell a gun if the seller knows the gun is being purchased with the intent of being used in a crime. Here what you have is Salesforce w…

GP isn’t asking whether it's legal to sue software companies for the acts of users. He’s asking if it's right and/or sensible. There are many, many corporations that sold services to Backpage. If the red line is built around awareness of wrongdoing, you are just going to create an incentive for corporations to stop being socially active and an incentive to remain ignorant to customers' backgrounds. Yes, we may want t…

>GP isn’t asking whether it's legal to sue software companies for the acts of users. He’s asking if it's right and/or sensible.

Ok...but it’s a much narrower issue because it’s not about a software vendor being sued for the acts of their customers. It’s being sued for selling your goods/services where you knew or should have known the buyer was going to use your good/service to commit a crime.

So in the extreme case, if a mass shooter told their plans to an arms dealer and the arms dealer sold the gun anyway...then yes, I don’t think many people will argue with the intent of the law.

Here the facts can be blurred a little more, where SF will say we just built a data base we didn’t know how it would be used, and if we did know how it would be used then we didn’t know that use was a crime, and if we did know it was a crime we felt defense xyz would apply.

No one is saying anything about due diligence. “Know or should have known” is a legal term of art and I think everyone is implying it creates an impossible burden for tech companies to comply with. And these aren’t regulations being “put in place” as you suggest, it’s long established Law.

Re: Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

#160

Post by nickpsecurity » Wed, Mar 27, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #53

leroy_masochist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

If on the other hand they were actually building features designed to keep more pimps on the platform (not sure what that would look like for pimps specifically vs. other Salesforce use cases, but just hypothetically) Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this article. I've read a number of things that suggest that Backpage was better for women, allowing them to market themselves, protect their safety, etc. I'm for the d…

"it winds up being just as bad as or worse than being pimped. It winds up being done to benefit male clients at the expense of female sex workers, basically."

I did an essay on legalization in college after a lot of research. I favor decriminalization, too, but I strongly disagree that regulation is just as bad or worse. The biggest problem I found was that prostitutes could be beaten, raped, and murdered with either no legal recourse or much less action by police. That's because people couldn't report the act or importance circumstances without risking jail time. Regulation, aka the circumstance itself is no longer criminal, might dramatically boost the safety and legal protections for prostitutes despite hardships it brings. What little data I had on regulated brothels here and overseas suggested they were way safer.