Omegle: "How I got the dangerous chat site closed down"
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
They clearly want the entire product category illegal. Omegle might be gone, but many similar services remain.
"In or about 2014" (the lawsuits wording) A.M. was paired with the abuser the terms stated " Do not use Omegle if you are under 13. If you are under 18, use it only with a parent/guardian's permission." [3]
I'm not saying they had an obligation legally, but personally thinking if you allow minors on a site esp, where you know people get their junk out to flash to other users, you prob should segregate those <18 yo and those >=18 yo. How you do that effectively? I dunno, but age gating (even minimal age gating) makes easier to argue that people are willfully misrepresenting themselves to your service and can't be expected to police EVERY user on the site, esp when they lie to you about their age. (Also would have helped against the claims that Omegle were serving ads for adult sites to minors too).
EDIT: However, taking from the lawsuit
> 39. In or about 2014, the Omegle Predator logged onto Omegle and was paired via text chat with A.M., an 11-year-old girl living with her family in Michigan. This was A.M.’s first time using Omegle alone. Other times, she and her friends had used it to have age-appropriate video chats at sleepovers.
> 40. On the Omegle platform, the Omegle Predator asked A.M. her age to which she responded, “Eleven.” The Omegle Predator continued the conversation and convinced A.M. that it was okay for them to keep communicating.
> 41. By the end of this 15-minute chat, A.M. found herself believing the Omegle Predator and trusting that he would help her “feel better”—something he had promised her.
> 42. The Omegle Predator asked A.M. for her contact information so they could stay in touch after the video chat ended
> 43. That same night, the Omegle Predator strategically gained A.M.’s trust and induced A.M. to send him photos of herself. First of her smile, and eventually, of her breasts, vagina, and other parts of her body. The Omegle Predator convinced A.M. that it was integral to her “healing” to trust him even if she felt uncomfortable
So I'm not 100% sure that anything bad even happened between A.M. and the predator on Omegle (Though I still skimming though the complaint) but then happened off-site afterwards. Not sure how you can police users interactions when they take conversations off-site.
EDIT 2: Also A.M. stated in the initial chat that she was 11, so wasn't allowed to use the site per Omegle's terms, but as in other cases, if sites "know" they have users below the age of 13 and are collecting personal information about those people they are running a foul of COPPA (just to name one child protection law).
EDIT 3: Would have been an interesting "Product Liability" case if it had gone to trial, plaintiffs argument seems to be "because omegle knew it had issues in the past with predators using the site, they should have and could have done more to protect others using the site from such predators, and so the product itself is faulty". Defense would prob said something along the lines of "no bad actions between A.M. and her abuser happened on the site during their initial chat, they then took their chat off-site, omegle can't be expected to police users off-site." among other defenses. Personally I believe it would be a crapshoot on an outcome because in civil cases its not "beyond a reasonable doubt" but a "preponderance of the evidence" (more likely to be true than false) and jurors don't like it when bad things happen to children.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220930045119/https://www.omegl...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20221006193003/https://www.omegl...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20140401224837/http://www.omegle...
Omegle became a safe haven for pedophiles and sex predators, and they are responsable for enabling them and not protecting their users.
There are other chat and video-chat sites that not only enforce their rules, they protect their users and ban those who don't follow the rules.
No, don't expect that from car manufacturers, they make cars not rules. Omegle, instead, made 'the car' and the rule not allowing minors in the site to avoid their responsibilities by law. They didn't enforce that rule and endangered them.
They must implement technical measures to accurately detect if someone is underage?
All these things should be banned until this technology exists?
Edit: well, after carefully rereading the post, it must be Grade-A sarcasm.
> The acknowledgment with a link to the lawsuit was also part of his settlement agreement with Alice.
I think this more likely gets Congress to expand section 230 to improve the shield, before working on the exceptions again
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
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.
Everything can and potentially will be. Facebook, Discord, Ome.tv, Matrix rooms, Roblox, whatever.
Three parties should be involved here and the parents are one.
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.
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?
The guardians of the child should be held responsible. When a child goes to a friends house their friends parents become the guardians. You as a parent decide trust that their friends parents are suitable for looking after your child.
It's the same as if you go in to the shop. Your relying on the shop keeper to keep the store responsible ensuring its not dangerous to yourself. As with the library, the library is responsible.
You walk in to my house, trip up on some turned up carpet who's fault is it? Your's technically because you should of seen the risk. However it is mine for having an potential hazard.
I should of informed yourself, btw the carpet is unsafe. The parents should of educated the child that the internet is unsafe and that such acts of this can occur online. This isn't 2005 when the internet was new, this was 2014 when internet was fully blown.
It could be more education that parents require however the parents are or at least should take blame. It was a website on the internet, their daughter was 11.
Parents should of known that on the internet malicious content exists: as do noodie magazines exist on the top shelf of the news agents.
This case plays out like the one of the parents of Maddie. They went out for a drink, left their three year old alone in a vila in another country but it's not our fault for going for drinks.
I don't know Omegle so don't know what the balance should be here, but lots of tech products are built with a "move fast, figure out the complicated bits later", which is right but which doesn't fit well with these sorts of nuances.
The thing is that the victim doesn't live in a vacuum. Anybody can be manipulated.
These people latch onto people who've had certain experiences... experiences that are often confusing... and also sometimes traumatic... and most often involve having been treated like crap in a major way by at least one hardcore asshole.
They usually go for those who've had the most extreme experiences, and already feel traumatized... and who have the least idea of how to approach that on their own. Then they manipulate those people. The word "groom" is not necessarily inapt.
If you don't have a strong social support network, or one that will help you with this taboo issue, then they'll give you a network. It'll be one where everybody sees things their way. They'll seem surprised, and maybe just a little disappointed, if you don't naturally buy in to most of their ideas. You'll get a ready-made set of supportive friends... at least as long as you follow the party line.
If you need a way to relate to the experience, or to part of the experience, they'll offer you an already built up, self-reinforcing framework of ideas and even feelings. They mostly truly believe that framework themselves. And of course it fits their agenda.
For the ways that you already feel damaged, they'll encourage you to nurse your sense of harm. No adjective is too extreme.
If you don't feel very damaged by some aspect they think "should" feel damaging, then they won't easily take you at your word. They'll believe, and probably tell you, and definitely silently telegraph, that you're in denial. If it's not on your mind, you're repressing it and "everybody's worried about you" (or some similar angle). Sure, you get to pick the things you feel most hurt by, but you'll won't find it easy to get away with completely shrugging off anything at all.
In every part of how you think about your experience, they'll encourage attitudes that maximize your perception of the damage. The mind being what it is, that increases the actual damage. If the victim decides what trauma is, then in at least in some part the perception of trauma is trauma. They amplify trauma.
Then we get to how you're meant to deal with that trauma.
They'll say, as a rote recitation, that everybody deals with these things differently, and they're unlikely to give you a bunch of commands. But the ways they'll assume and expect are normal or praiseworthy will be ways that match their agenda.
... and the one thing you don't ever get to do is to decide you're over it. You're persona non grata if you do that. To be truly healed is to be shunned.
They'll encourage you to make the whole thing a major part of your identity... and more so if you want to stay in the core of the club. That often comes in the form of a strange contradictory view, where you define yourself as somebody who refuses to be defined as a victim. Which still defines you as a victim, but in a way you won't have to notice.
If you've truly been hurt (heck, even if you hadn't been hurt), there are usually plenty of people you can legitimately blame. They'll try to concentrate your blame on the people they want to use it against. And they won't easily let any blame go to waste; transgressors must be punished! Or at least ritually vilified. You can always come up with a reason why somebody is even worse than you thought.
They'll "love bomb" you and bury you in praise if you get behind their public agenda. If you don't, you'll get a sort of "Oh, well, I guess it's OK. Not everybody's strong enough to fight the forces of evil and be an inspiring, luminous survivor advocate like Mary over here".
... and they'll encourage you to do all that to the next person who comes along.
You can watch them do this just by reading the news, and once you look for it, you can see it in the things they say in blogs, social media, and random comments.
I imagine it feels pretty much the way they describe it feeling.
Some of the people who go through the campaigners' mill probably end up better off than they otherwise would. Not that many people deal well with that sort of thing without some kind of social support framework, especially not in the extreme cases. If they had no true alternatives, and they didn't get picked up by the advocates, maybe they'd still be badly traumatized for life, but without the support group.
But that's a big crapshoot. Other people are going to end up with their problems amplified, and turn something that they'd get over, or mostly get over, into something that's a huge part of the rest of their lives.
In fact I suspect you usually end up worse off after you've been through the advocacy groups than you'd be if you'd done something else... even working it out purely on your own. Especially after the attention moves from your case to some other and you're down to just being a member of the rank and file with a standard "brave survivor" badge.
What would probably be best, for many and probably most people, would be to find some kind of support system that concentrated more on healing them and less, if I may be a bit uncharitable, on making them effective cult assets. It would be better for them, and also better for the next person to come along.
I do understand that not everybody has those options. More importantly, they may not see their options. Choices aren't obvious like that when shit is happening in real life. If you both had the options and understood them clearly, it would probably mean you didn't have nearly so big a problem to begin with.
Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure there are better choices out there for most people. Get a more mainstream counselor. Find a non-political [on edit: less political] group. Lean on your your wise friends and family if you have them (can be a problem for some of the worse affected...). And in some cases just plain deal with it in your own... yes, it can be perfectly healthy to just decide it's not that big a deal for you.
It can't hurt if the culture at large recognizes that there are other options, and that the campaigners don't need to be a default choice when somebody is in need and knocked for a loop.
She didn't. She had empathy for the other victims that might have been out there.
And she did something effective about it. Something commendable and honorable. She took down the very means by which this widespread abuse was perpetuated.
Sometimes, being right means doing things for others. You should try that and find out for yourself just how much value empathy can add to a lifetime.