Salesforce.com Must Face Texas Victims over Sex-Trafficking | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce.com Must Face Texas Victims over Sex-Trafficking

bloomberg.com

28 pointsmarshray7 comments

> U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Houston ruled that the women’s claims should proceed because there’s evidence Salesforce.com continued selling customer-relationship management tools and services to the internet ad company after law enforcement publicly accused it of running a nationwide online brothel.

So the police publicly accusing you of doing something harmful to others now means the power and phone companies have to immediately cut off your service lest they become liable?

That's not how it's supposed to work. Am I reading this wrong?

It's beyond ridiculous -- there's no reason not to keep cascading that reasoning into everything. Any business that serviced backpage is a sex-traffic supporter; Any business that serviced a business that serviced to backpage is also a sex-traffic supporter.

You could even make the case that the US government itself, in not immediately and totally eliminating backpage from existence upon public accusation, and thus allowing its continued operation, is a sex-traffic supporter. And of course, every government that provides services to the US government. And even the taxpayer, who didn't refuse to pay tax this year to a government in support of sex trafficking, have also supported the backpage operation.

It's a badly written article (is this a civil or a criminal case?), but my reading is that because of these facts the case was not immediately dismissed. Which does not mean Salesforce is liable, just that they need to show up for an actual trial.

When the government wants a website down, they ask the domain controller to take down the domain. If Backpage was guilty, the government should have just asked everyone to stop providing services to them.

Backpage had many legit sections like Craigslist for trading used items and jobs, and there were not any explicit indicators that the girls were not offering their services voluntarily like many other websites that are active to this day.

I can see an argument being made about the payment processing services being directly beneficial to facilitating the trafficking that was taking place. But I don't think it's a good one.

I think it's unreasonable for Salesforce to be expected to keep up with all of the news or accusations, legal or otherwise, about their clients.

Hmm, something is wrong with this. Surely Backpage's catering company isn't in trouble too? Or their hosting company, etc.? Their ISP?

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