21–30 of 58 posts
Going 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.
Omegle 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.
Never 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.
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.
Going 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.
Omegle 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.
Why 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.
Internet 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 ar…
It 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.
What a terrible person. Feels good about destroying something because she is a poor parent. This is the slow death of the open internet, manifest.
She 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.
Going 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.
Omegle 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Internet 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 ar…
I 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.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 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.
What 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 befor…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Omegle 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.
No it shouldn't have any such obligation, because it explicitly stated minors were not to enter on its front page. Do you expect car manufacturers to make driving safe for children too?
"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. 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...