I disagree with the people here who call out Benioff's hypocrisy in making this statement.<p>It's not uncommon or hypocritical for companies to be in favour of regulation that would prohibit things that they currently do. The whole point is that if Salesforce would currently start respecting privacy more than they'd be legally required to, for plain ethical reasons, but other companies don't do the same, then they have a competitive disadvantage. If the law requires them to do so, they can be more ethical while the playing field is level.<p>Of course there's still a strong and fair open discussion on how far a company should go in the "totally unethical but technically legal" arena of evil shit. But I don't see much of that discussion in this thread.<p>Companies often welcome regulation. I once read somewhere that when cigarette companies were forbidden to advertise in the EU, their profits went up. All of them were only advertising to compete with the others, it was an arms race without end. When the entire arms race got outlawed, cost shrunk but income did not change. Smokers didn't suddenly switch brand because they didn't see bad jokes about camels every commercial block.<p>I also disagree with the argument that this is a call for regulation to keep newcomers out. It's true that bigco's rooting for regulation often do this for anticompetitive reasons and it's abysmal, but I really don't see how increased privacy controls such as the GDPR (but in more places) prevents incumbents from outperforming and outmarketing the big shots. You need to come with a stronger argument about how such regulation affects Salesforce less than a tiny startup. Assuming it's decent regulation, of course - I fully agree if this ends up being a legal minefield.<p>But eg the GDPR is decent regulation that is really not that hard to abide to unless you're genuinely evil (I say this as the owner of a small EU-based startup). The world could use more of that stuff.