Fifty Women Say Salesforce Helped Sex Traffickers Exploit Them

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 to regulate certain influential industries to require them to do due diligence on their clientele. No, I don't think it makes sense to penalize these players before this regulation is put in place due to the perverse incentives.

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 consultation that they would give to anyone who asked.

backpage had been doing its business in the open in USA for almost 10 years when it became client of Salesforce in 2013. So, until 2018 no DA was bothered by the human trafficking supposedly rampant on backpage during that time, while it sounds that it was Salesforce's burden to do that the DAs hadn't and wouldn't for years - i.e. to perform investigation, etc.

Do we really want a massive SaaS company to criminally investigate its clients at its own initiative? May be it is exactly what we want - I think there is a massive attack across the board on the provider safe harbor principle with the goal to scare the providers into skittish self-censorship which the most and foremost would affect the basic civic freedoms.

source?

There were a number of other companies that played both sides of the fence in WW2, including Coca Cola.

I agree, if they knowingly do it, then they should be punished as such. Especially in the US, if we are going to allow corporations to be treated as people for tax and legal reasons, then clearly they should be punished as such. When a person knowingly assists a criminal, that person can be punished for any range of crime from being an accessory to directly involved.

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 decriminalization of sex work -- as described in the book "Working: My life as a prostitute" by Dolores French. She makes the point that legalization usually means regulation and 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.

So I can easily see a situation where, in a world where the current system typically exploits female sex workers, trying to increase sales as your stated goal could deepen the problems of women who are already victims.

If you are against sex work, please try to help women access other work safely and at a living wage/"equal pay" (instead of or at least in addition to preaching about your opinions that sex work is a bad thing and simply shouldn't be tolerated). Women wind up trapped in part because it pays well and they often have little to no viable alternatives. If you aren't actively working in some way to help make it possible for women to adequately support themselves some other way, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I spent nearly six years homeless. There was no shortage of men offering to give me a few bucks to sleep with them. Meanwhile, I was mostly failing to get taken seriously in my attempts to earn income some other way.

There are reasons why I was able to still say "no" in the face of tremendous circumstantial pressure, but it made me very aware that a lot of women simply don't have enough wherewithal to just say "no" themselves. (There is some truth to the idea that you need a middle class income to be able to afford a middle class morality.)

I was briefly acquainted with another homeless woman whose solution was to move in with some guy she had just met in order to get back into housing. She apparently only spent a few days on the street because of making this choice.

It's perhaps a more polite form of prostitution to call him your boyfriend and not charge by the hour, but I've thought a whole lot about it and I would much rather charge by the hour than move in with some man for his money and wind up probably essentially being his prisoner. This goes double in the case of a stranger I've just met and know nothing about. Wow. That idea just scares the hell out of me.

Edit: Just for the record, I'm also against UBI, in addition to being against "legalization"/regulation of sex work.

Tools aside, I have mixed feelings on the Backpage shutdown. What I've heard through friends of friends is that for non-trafficked sex workers this was a service that helped them earn a living much more safely than being out on the street looking for clients. Losing it has not been good for them.

One of the side effects of outlawing sex work is that everyone has to operate under the radar - both the people working a job for themselves and the human trafficking rings. If it were a legal profession operating in the open, would we be in a better position to find and help the people who are being forced in to it?

Similar problems to what we've seen with drug prohibition and the cartels.

IANAL, but a simple google for something like "landlord responsible for tenant crime" should turn up loads of results on the topic.

it's really not the same at all. drivers are liable for damage and injuries they directly cause in accidents where they are legally at fault. they have to purchase insurance because most people can't afford to replace someone's car or pay their medical bills if they cause an accident. we don't sue car dealerships for selling cars to irresponsible buyers.

How can person A prevent a crime caused by person B? They cannot. Situations happen. People commit crimes for the first time every day (shocking even close family members). People like serial killers (and many other forms of covert criminals) may go undetected for decades with those people having perfect records.

Since crime cannot be prevented by a landlord and cannot be completely avoided, what can that landlord do to mitigate their risk? They must discriminate. They look at groups which appear to commit disproportionate crimes (by whatever "metrics" they choose to look at) and then start cutting away. Bad credit, being poor, being the "wrong race", prior convictions -- the list of risks seems endless.

The law (with very good reason) prohibits this kind of profiling, but that causes a catch 22 in the mind of the landlord, so the discrimination simply happens in a less-obvious manner. Meanwhile, these people are shifted into bad neighborhoods and ghettos to become trapped forever and crime continues on regardless.

Since no crime is prevented (at most, its only moved elsewhere), the law is ineffective. That would be bad enough, but it also proceeds to punish the landlord and a long list of underprivileged people. The cure is definitely worse than the problem.

Two factors are at play here, although “wrong with people” may be overly harsh and is certainly unhelpful. First, a lot of people, myself included, think that prohibition of prostitution is a bad idea. Now I’d argue that in this case that’s a bit of a red herring, because we’re talking about sexual slavery, not sexual work.

The second factor is a little nasty, but let’s face it... a site full of “toolmakers” takes a strong stance against people who make tools being held accountable for the uses of those tools. What a shock. Now it’s not just that simple, because some people are legitimately concerned about the proverbial blacksmith being held liable for making hammers. Others point out that if the blacksmith specially made “head cracking hammers” for Big Bob The Headsmasher, then the blacksmith crossed a line. Others are ideologically or practically opposed to almost any regulation.

It’s a mess of people talking past each other, angrily. Personally I believe that BackPage was a bad actor, and as for SF I’ll wait and see what pretrial discovery turns up. Most people seem to be more interested in rushing to conclusions though, and fighting over hypotheticals, hence the high noise:signal ratio here.

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.

[1] https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/global-repo...

As for sex work, there's absolutely no good reason why it shouldn't be completely destigmatized, decriminalized, and treated like any other kind of work. There are some inherent risks, but if it's decriminalized they can be managed and brought down to acceptable levels. There are certainly jobs with higher inherent risks, like working in lumber, or oil rigs, or construction. For women who aren't savvy enough to make it on their own, brothels are a good solution. With decriminalization, the bosses in brothels can be kept accountable.

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".

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

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/22/super_micro_chinese...

Seems a bit paradoxical that he apparently donates all the time without people knowing, but you seem to know...