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I don’t see how any of these chat apps you described is any different to IRC which I frequented as a kid. It had wll the horrors you describe but navigating tha

• Fnoord 7y ago
  As someone who grew up in the 90s as kid and IRC (and ICQ, and chats) I disagree. The first time I used IRC I used mIRC. It was in 1997. It asked for my real name. I filled it in. Fast forward a few days, I get into an argument with someone, and they call me by my real name. I was flabbergasted. How do they know my name? I never knew that the real name was shared with IRC networks; I assumed it was shared with mIRC only. I had the same on ICQ, including my phone number, which was once abused to stalk me. Did I learn from this? Hell yes, I got more private and careful. And it isn't as if I already wasn't. I never gave people my hometown or last name. Heck, I met strange people who wanted to cyber on a web chat when I was 14 years old. But I never gave them my PII (oh and I found it more funny than that it got me horny as I could not take it serious). Only thing was my first name which is a common one. My mistake was to trust the software. The reason I disagree is the following: in the 90s I did not have a webcam or camera. I had a mic but it was not connected 24/7, and I could not use it to make a phone call. I did not even have my own cellphone yet, let alone a smartphone. I did have a walkman and discman, I'll admit that, but I don't see how such devices were harmful. Nowadays teenagers have smartphones, and they willfully share personal information with the Internet; that is, with companies, with the government (as a result of that), and with strangers and family & friends alike. Because of the snowball/network effect, many of them are being on these networks (Facebook, Snapchat, etc). The papertrail / records are more permanent than ever before. And it isn't just sex-related. It is also bullying-related ie. cyberbullying, making videos of bullying and putting it on YouTube. The point is, we created a monster. The monster is called data.
• SolarNet 7y ago
  IRC wasn't targeted at children. IRC required effort and understanding to access. IRC wasn't in your pocket all the time. IRC didn't include video and picture taking capabilities built in (one would have to work at it to send content like that). IRC had moderation (admins were often responsive to issues), decentralization (each server was it's own small social network), and local communities (one could figure out the difference between a legit and sketch server); worse come to worse, people could just go somewhere else (most modern social media is tied to your phone number - something difficult for children to change - and the app your friends are on is a limiting factor, there is no running away). IRC was easily anonymous, there wasn't reverse image searches, geotagging, or having friends in your social network leak information inadvertently. > But yeah, you can see porn on there and child predators can also access it.. so uh, child abuse or something. Lets just ban everything. That's a straw-man of my position. Nowhere did I advocate banning anything. I clearly stated that my issue was the harm caused for the sake of profit. Google could hire 30,000 moderators. Tumblr could (have) take(n) the issue seriously and redesigned the moderation tools it has (and it's reporting system). Kik could have improved the privacy and anonymity they offer their users (and maybe work to do something about communities that actively - basically publicly - exploit children). The operators of the fly by night chat rooms should probably be investigated, have a strongly worded meeting with an officer and prosecutor (along the lines of "your service is being actively used for extensive criminal activity; here is a search warrant"), and be arrested if they don't shut down their offerings (or radically pivot away) now that they are aware of the criminal activity they are facilitating (or if that investigation turned up their knowing facilitation of criminal activity). My preferred alternative of federation would fix the problem by simply being better in many ways. Your description is also a straw man of what is happening. We are talking about coordinated grooming of children. People who make many accounts (backed by using proxies, buying untraceable phone numbers, etc.), host servers and develop custom applications (e.g. targeted apps like chat rooms, or to scrape social networks for victims), and then use these tools for targeted attacks on victims (armed with personal details, secrets gained from their close friends through social engineering attacks, pretending to be multiple people, and so on). Let alone some of the recent stuff like realtime deepfakes, which I can only imagine how that is going to be used. The victims here are children. Do you realize how regularly trained adults fail simple social engineering tests? With alarming regularity. The adversary model here is a motivated persistent personal threat. The win scenario is compromising a single child, and they can easily choose their targets. The information available includes full access to a child's social media and friend network and basically an unlimited number of tries (phrasing it like that makes me realize it can effectively be brute forced). We cannot expect children to survive that threat model unharmed. On IRC you could log out (or log into a different server!), walk away, and play with your friends. On kik if you log out you are alone, if you walk away your life is over, all of your friends are there.