Tweet
It would be awfully difficult for Google to continue its mission of worldwide domination of the online advertising market and not be a player in one of its most lucrative sectors, sex advertising.
It’s been five months since Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Rep. Marsha Blackburn sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page asking him to explain how Google polices the sale of Adwords ads to human sex traffickers.
Google’s response was to promote its Google Ideas Initiative, which burnishes its image with NGO’s working in the field but really didn’t address its own role in profiting from advertizing of what they acknowledge is an annual $2.1 trillion industry. Or what they’re doing to limit the use of Google’s networks in its perpetuation.
Now the issue raises its ugly head again, in the form of the Utoopi App carried on Google’s Android marketplace. MusicTechPolicy notes that the App promotes itself thusly:
All the paid sex of your city geolocated and always available on your mobile, iPad and computer. JOIN THE SEX CLUB.
The issue of sex trafficking of minors is hyped all too frequently by culture warriors and law enforcement to restrain civil rights and hound those engaged in what is a legal and regulated profession in many parts of the world. But human sex trafficking is nonetheless a real problem that grows when its perpetrators have access to global online networks.
When asked about what they’re doing to prevent illegal traffickers from gaining access to their networks, Google has responded by issuing vague statements about “specially trained teams,” “working with law enforcement” and the “latest technology.” But the $11.5 million they recently gave to groups fighting against human sex slavery has the appearance of buying off critics rather than actually dealing with the underlying problem.
In a statement today issued to Bytegeist about the Utoopi App, Rep. Maloney says:
It is appalling beyond belief that someone would try to market an ‘app’ like Utoopi, which is about illegal escort services plain and simple.
Google must live up to its own stated promise to ban the promotion of sex services by immediately removing Utoopi from the Android ‘app’ marketplace hosted by Google.
A real utopia would be a society in which major corporations like Google take responsibility for preventing their platforms from being hijacked by those who would market the bodies of young women and men to the highest bidder.
As Breeanne Howe notes, Google AdWords Terms of Service specifically prohibits “the promotion of escort services, prostitution, or other adult sexual services.” Android Apps certainly aren’t part of Google AdWords, but it’s hard to see how Google is applying any kind of consistent policy.
Former Congresswoman Susan Molinari has been hired by Google to head up government relations in their DC office. I contacted Rep. Molinari and offered her the opportunity to respond to Congresswoman Maloney’s statement. They told me to send an email to “press@Google.com.” As of 2:30 pm ET they have not responded.
Update: Google has removed the Utoopi App from Google Play.
17 Comments
Don’t worry, google is on top of things. If they don’t answer you, you have nothing because they are taking care of things otherwise. Didn’t you say they have hired a former pol for dc relations? Everything will be fine now.
Sadly, that does seem to be the way that many things get addressed in DC.
The best way to deal with sex trafficking is to legalize and regulate prostitution. The benefits are reduced crime (beyond the crime of prostitution), reduced blight since the problem is contained to certain districts, improved safety for prostitutes and customers alike, reduced spread of VD, less police corruption, the eradication of child prostitution.
Is there any evidence that illegal sex trafficking is being perpetrated by people utilizing Utoopi?
No, it’s being used by the faithful to find a local church while traveling, when they have a prayer emergency or when they feel the need for a quick prayer.
Google updated:
I should rephrase that, because all prostitution is illegal in most places.
I should ask ‘Is there any evidence that illegal sex trafficking of minors is being perpetrated by people utilizing Utoopi?’.
The sex industry will make use of the internet for as long as there is an internet. The sex industry helped drive the growth of the commercial internet originally. If internet access becomes mobile via smart devices, then the sex industry will use that.
It would probably be smarter to work with operators in the sex industry itself to police underaged and non-consensual prostitution, then to try to somehow stuff away and repress away the industry itself. It’s a demand-driven industry that probably predates even agriculture.
Well said. I agree wholeheartedly.
There will always be prostitution. With the finite resources that law enforcement and government may have to pursue the issue, they should focus on keeping children safe, and women who are forced into sex slavery safe.
Throwing rocks at the people hosting an app accomplishes nothing for the victims and does not hurt the criminals.
I have no argument with that, but I think the topic of this discussion is about how politics and technoloty merge.
If you didn’t see it, Jane Hamsher has a new tap at the top, bytegeist, dealing with technological issues.
**
And, thank you Janes for this post. I had to read a couple of the paragraphs over several times. But, I come here to get educated. Won’t be able to add much in comments except thanks, but I will chew and think and learn.
You never fail to but your head into the new, cutting edge issues. Well, you’ve got fabulous people covering the other critical issues. :)
Maybe calling attention to this will help. We don’t know.
I think it’s an admirable quest.
Prostitution may always happen, but I’ve heard it’s not a healthy life style for those on their backs. It’s one thing to try to ignore an ongoing activity that’s abusive, and it’s another thing to enable it.
Legalization and regulation of prostitution, as well as “illegal” drugs, would be an effective method of removing the really detrimental facets, but in a “good Christian nation” that condones violence and is appalled by anything sexual, it’s not going to happen.
In its desire to create an App Store that was not the “walled garden” over at Apple, they have instead created a wild west town. Look, there’s the overworked and inept sheriff now. He’s trying to audit code on thousands of apps every day, driving him to drankin’….
They are repeatedly “shocked,…shocked” to find out that gambling is going on. And malware, and premium SMS scams, and user info hijacking, and other innumerable things in violation of their own TOS. They get money off each and every one. They will remove them when people squeak, only to be replaced by others.
This battle, unwinnable on the streets, will not be won in the App Store either. They really should change their motto to “Don’t be poor”.
They probably Googled ‘bytegeist’ and didn’t find anything in the archives. Then they tried DuckDuckGo, had luckluck no.
There’s another way to view the hitech sex-for-shock issue, and I’ll use then NY AG Cuomo’s chill out threat as the prime example. In 2007 (?) he threatened AOL in NY for hosting on their servers child pornography including child-sex solicitation, through ‘binaries’ (encoded pics, videos, music, etc.) on AOL’s Usenet (News Groups) gateway.
Rather than excluding binaries (which Google excludes in its Usenet mirrors) AOL decided to stop including Usenet altogether to its subscribers. Soon enough, all major ISP’s also stopped including Usenet, which was always included free.
Although a lot of illegal pornography and abuse passed through those Usenet servers, most of Usenet had nothing to do with porn (even though the amount of porn on Usenet probably accounts for most of the traffic).
But Usenet has been (and still is) a way to steal uploaded music files, video, and feature length movies. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that the RIAA and the MPAA asked Cuomo for a favor.
Sometimes apps and sites (like newspaper ads used to do) are used to entrap or to fish for certain types. (Go watch The Parallax View, then go to your library and check the microfilms of large city newspaper classifieds from the early 1960s for a match, and you’ll find them.)
In the early 2000s I received an email (maybe because I posted and read at Usenet regularly) asking me if I wanted to view — well, the descriptions were horrifying, so I won’t repeat them. I deleted it. I received another similar one soon after, and deleted it. I assumed it was a law-enforcement fishing expedition. (My best friend was a cop and a detective. They did that sort of thing.)
A few weeks later there were two huge child-sex ring busts in the area, most of the evidence stored on PC’s.
Before the Storyville red light district was created in New Orleans, the recruitment of underage girls into prostitution was a real problem in the city. During the nearly 20 years that Storyville operated (January 1, 1898, till closed by the US Department of the Navy in November 1917), there were only a few arrests for underage prostitution, and all of those were outside the red light district.
I’ve never received that sort of email, but I’d read some time ago that the largest distributor of child pornography is the law enforcement community in aggregate, because they send this stuff out to people that have sex offender status already or that they think might go for it if it’s offered to them; it’s a much easier way of getting busts than going after people already actively involved in producing or distributing it.