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Omegle: "How I got the dangerous chat site closed down"
- fnordian_slip 3y agoIn case anyone is interested, Leif Brooks made a statement after the verdict, directly on the homepage: https://www.omegle.com/ https://www.omegle.com/
- netsharc 3y agoI can't tell if the last line "I thank A.M. for opening my eyes to the human cost of Omegle." is meant to be Grade-A sarcasm, or sincere. Edit: well, after carefully rereading the post, it must be Grade-A sarcasm.
- webmobdev 3y agoThe deal required him to acknowledge the lawsuit publicly. He chose to be polite about it: > The acknowledgment with a link to the lawsuit was also part of his settlement agreement with Alice.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199355
- yieldcrv 3y agoInteresting, product liability suits will cause app operators to actually respond differently, instead of ignoring the suit hoping it goes away under section 230. I think this more likely gets Congress to expand section 230 to improve the shield, before working on the exceptions again
- busssard 3y agocan you ELI5? i have no idea what any of what you wrote means :D
- Chabsff 3y agoI admire your optimism. The only times section 230 has been brought up on the hill in the last decade as been in, admittedly performative and doomed to fail, calls to get rid of it entirely.
- yieldcrv 3y agoSOSTA and FESTA passed with ease in 2018 or so I expect using it as political futbol needs it to be impervious as is, I think they patch it and continue using it as political futbol
- johngladtj 3y agoWhat an evil person.
- bigger_inside 3y agoThis (she) is why we can't have nice (non-corporate) things
- doublerabbit 3y agoWhy are her parents not being mentioned for letting their 11 year daughter on the internet unsupervised? Especially on Webcam. Three parties should be involved here and the parents are one.
- tzs 3y agoInternet is sufficiently pervasive nowadays that is it probably no longer practical for parents to directly supervise children all the time they are using it. Strong parental controls on the devices the kids use might work but there are some major holes in that approach. The big one is that nearly everyone has one or more internet access devices. It is not hard for a kid to find someone else's device to use. Sites are probably going to need to bite the bullet and at a minimum not allow interaction between anonymous users and children. That probably will require some sort of age verification. Age verification can be done in a way that doesn't reveal anything to the site other than that the person is not a child and doesn't reveal to anyone other than the site that the person visited the site. But it can also be done in a way that gives the site much more information and reveals to third parties that you visited the site. It might be a good idea for people concerned about privacy to get ahead on this one, recognize that age verification is probably going to become a requirement, and instead of just lobbying against all age verification also work to ensure that when that fails and we do get mandated age verification we get the kind that only reveals age to the site and doesn't reveal to anyone else what site age was verified for.
- archerx 3y agoI rather ban children of the internet and have the parents be liable for what ever happens to their children if they still go online. Children didn’t have access to the internet for thousands of years and they survived.
- tzs 3y agoWhat happens if a child uses a computer at a friend's house to go online and something bad happens? Is it still the child's parents who are liable, or would it be the parents of the friend who are liable? What about a public computer like at a library? Banning children from the internet would probably require any computer that a child might obtain access to to be locked down and verify that an adult is using it before going online. That's going to be way more obtrusive than a well designed way to do anonymous age verification. It would affect nearly everyone who wants to go online, instead of only people who want to go online at sites that aren't safe for children. > Children didn’t have access to the internet for thousands of years and they survived. Adults also didn't have access to the internet for thousands of years and they survived, so what's your point?
- porkbeer 3y agoWhat a terrible person. Feels good about destroying something because she is a poor parent. This is the slow death of the open internet, manifest.
- aa-jv 3y agoShe was not a parent - she was a child victim of the site since she was 11 years old. Thats an important distinction to overlook in the rush to judgement.
- joenot443 3y agoI had plenty of similarly unsavory experiences as a preteen with unfettered internet access, but never in my adulthood did I think I should go back and seek vengeance on the platforms. I chalked it up to my own youthful stupidly and moved on. This woman is a ghoul.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoShe should be you is what you're saying?
- Hizonner 3y agoWell, she should probably have avoided letting insane political campaigners "counsel" her about how to feel about it or serve as her "support network". They are systematic exploiters who are in the business of turning non-traumatic experiences traumatic, turning traumatic experiences ultra-traumatic, and using people as political and media pawns. If you've already been manipulated, they're ready and willing to manipulate you some more.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoWho gets to determine which experiences are traumatic and which aren't?
- lrvick 3y agoGoing after the abuser... of course. Going after a video chat application because it is unable to provide personalized human monitoring for every conversation, is insane. Meanwhile no doubt a dozen competitors just got a boost in traffic.
- Astraco 3y agoOmegle had the obligation to protect their users, specially if they are minors. It lacked the tools and the moderation. I'm glad it is gone.
- ErikBjare 3y agoOmegle cannot perfectly protect their users from other users, and cannot determine who is a minor without ID verification (as we have seen in Virginia and Mississippi for porn sites). They clearly want the entire product category illegal. Omegle might be gone, but many similar services remain.
- Astraco 3y agoDoes Discord or Zoom enforce their rules? How other sites like icanhazchat enforce that rule? Omegle didn't care about their own rules, endangering minors.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoI think in modern times in theory they could have AI analyze the conversations to spot any such grooming behaviour.
- phanimahesh 3y agoWhat kind of tools and moderation would have been effective? Genuinely curious to hear perspectives.
- Astraco 3y agoThe same ones that Discord or Zoom have.
- tjpnz 3y agoIt never ceases to disturb me when an individual expresses pride in censoring something legal out of existence. This isn't an isolated case either, there are numerous individuals, deserving of even less sympathy, engaged in the gleeful destruction of the web and net neutrality.
- joenot443 3y ago[flagged]
- Hizonner 3y agoNo, that's not fair. They're almost never in it for the money. The people who orchestrate this stuff are exploiters who look for people who've been hurt by some experience, and use them to further their political causes and perhaps their careers. Usually, by looking for people who've been hurt, these exploiters of course end up finding the people who are, at least at some particular time and place, most susceptible to being hurt by such an experience. So they end up with extreme cases. I guess you could say the people they recruit are "weak willed", but that's both unproductive and mostly wrong. It makes it sound like they're profoundly different from everybody else, and they're not. People's reactions to experiences are conditional on all kinds of things. You can be "weak willed" one day and not on another. And if you think you're unconditionally "strong willed", you're probably deluding yourself. Anyway, the exploiters groom the victims they find into feeling more hurt, into self-perpetuating obsessions over it, and into usually-not-very-productive ways of trying to deal with those. They increase both their sense of victimization and their actual victimhood, and they work to amplify the whole thing until it's life-consuming. They encourage the victims to believe they can get vindication and "closure" by filing lawsuits, or by putting on a show for the media or in front of legislators, or whatever else is convenient. Maybe the worst part is that the exploiters mostly don't even realize they're exploiters. And many of them started out as victims themselves.
- webmobdev 3y agoNever realised that Omegle had become a platform for the creeps. She sued for $22 million. I don't see anything heroic in that, despite her tragic circumstances. But I really wonder what the authorities where doing - if paedophiles were using the platform, sounds like it would have been easy to identify and trap them.
- tzs 3y ago> But I really wonder what the authorities where doing - if paedophiles were using the platform, sounds like it would have been easy to identify and trap them You didn't need an account to use Omegle and when it matched you up with someone the chat/video was peer-to-peer directly between your computer and theirs. Not really much to go on if you are trying to identify the person on the other end.
- DontchaKnowit 3y agoExcept you have their IP so if theycommited a crim you could directly identify them via the ISP and then you also have a video of them so you can prove itsthem using the device... so actually sounds like it gibes you everything you need
- johnisgood 3y ago> Never realised that Omegle had become a platform for the creeps. Everything can and potentially will be. Facebook, Discord, Ome.tv, Matrix rooms, Roblox, whatever.
- Hizonner 3y ago"She" was working with (I am tempted to say "fell into the hands of") an advocacy organization which handled the lawsuit. The purpose of the suit wasn't ever to collect compensation for anything. It was to harass Omegle, and to intimidate Omegle and others. Demanding a lot of money damages was part of that. Driving Omegle out of business was a grade-A success even if she got zero money.
- webmobdev 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dingi 3y agoWell done lady. Shooting the messenger is always the easiest. Good luck doing the same for plethora of alternatives as they won't give a damn about your sob story.
- MaxikCZ 3y agoI was abused in school too! Lets shut them all down!!