What "attacks" is he referring to?
I think the best thing we can do for our children is talk to them, and to start talking to them early.
"There is a cost" or "I don't want to" are not reasonable excuses, depending on use case and regulatory regime you're operating under. It sucks, but there are many terrible people out there. Hopefully the EFF and ACLU can work to balance out regulation from government in this space.
(what sites access is gated by age is a distinct conversation)
https://www.theverge.com/23721306/online-age-verification-pr...
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/5/23494175/facebook-dating-...
https://www.yoti.com/wp-content/uploads/Yoti-Age-Estimation-...
And talking about "age verification" as if it's some straightforward addition is an utterly dishonest framing. The core idea of the distributed Internet is the barest of communication which further complexity/policy can be layered on top of. "Age verification" actually implies the much more draconian and chilling meatspace identity verification.
Nobody has a problem with a DigitalKidsPlayLand which performs identity verification, strictly curates/moderates content, and escrows all activity for later review. It's this push to legally require such things for everyone, based on some idea that everything needs to be made kid-safe, that is horribly authoritarian and needs to be soundly rejected.
Eight states as of this comment have legislation that has passed requiring age verification. Ten other states have introduced legislation that has not yet passed. (US centric)
> In 2022, Louisiana passed a law requiring the use of age verification on websites that contain a “substantial portion” (33.33%) of adult content. Websites must utilize commercial age verification systems that check a user’s government identification or “public or private transactional data” to confirm that a user is at least 18 years old. Louisiana’s law has sparked a flurry of copycat legislation to be introduced in state houses around the country.
https://action.freespeechcoalition.com/age-verification-bill...
Is this a real question?
If someone showed up at a bar, would a bouncer accept that?
In this case, they have no obligation to ensure everyone has ID on their person.
Can you sue a bar you used fake ID to get into?
My real question wasn’t if there are kids on the system or not, but why are they allowed to sue when they themselves and nobody else have lied about the age verification question?
And establishments get shut down all the time for it.
[https://ftxidentity.com/blog/abc-laws-if-minor-is-served/]
Next question?
Anyway, it’s really twisted my original point your leaning into alcohol laws that do not apply.
If I make a service that says nobody named Bob can use it, have a checkbox Not Bob? - how can I get sued by someone named Bob?
In your new example:
- is there a regulatory reason that it is illegal for them to serve someone named Bob? Or is there a real risk/harm that people named Bob would suffer that they know about and is predictable?
- did they do any of the checks they are legally required to do to prevent someone named Bob from accessing the service and therefore suffering that injury? Or make a good faith effort to not just injure any Bob’s, at a minimum?
If they didn’t, then yet a Bob could sue if he managed to get through and get injured.
Pretty weird example though.
It was after the suit was filed (prior to the suit, AIUI, Omegle had an over-18 warning (with no confirmation) on the Unmoderated chat option, and a stated policy that users had to be 18+ or 13+ with parents permission.
Also, it may not have been because of this suit, there is at least one other suit that was found not to be barred by Section 230 (this one avoided S230 immunity because it is a product liability suit, not one contingent on their role as a publisher; the other one I've seen, IIRC, was found to raise a triable question of fact regarding whether Omegle's behavior was within the category of knowing involvement in trafficking that brought it out of S230 protection.)
Pick one.
This is fucked. We shouldn't have to put safety padding on everything as a stand-in for something parents are supposed to do, ie. being responsible for their brood.
Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?
Should we ban kitchen knives because they're sharp?
Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and/or head?
The question, as usual, isn't all or nothing. It's what can we do that will meet all the criteria as best possible: not infringe on freedoms, reduce harm, be affordable, etc.
Essentially we lost faith in the system and I don’t think it will ever come back. So where do we go from here?
A bit extreme? It will come back if you choose it, if you do it. The despair, as I posted, is trendy but it's absurd - the most ridiculous, counterproductive philosophical trend I can imagine. Stop philosophizing and just start doing!
What should I do? I have no one I want to vote for and honestly I don’t care enough to do it myself. At this point it’s just figuring out how you can profit off this and get your own piece of land to check out on.
I don’t find this to be depressing it’s just what I see as facts.
We'd have to redefine depressing to exclude that post. Look at all the ways it advocates quitting; it's impressive in a way.
> That is the way the various media outlets portray it. And that is the rhetoric that has taken over politics.
Do you think that makes it true? That seems to support my claim that it's trendy, and people repeating these things because others say it are by definition following a trend.
I've seen many trends come and go, but this one - despair as a trend - is the dumbest.
Also, who is going to get anything done? We aren't children; our parents won't fix things if we don't do it. We'd better get to work, like prior generations who sacrificed and built so much. What will you tell your grandkids - 'well, I just quit; it was the fashionable thing to do.'
Have you considered this trend is encouraged by people who don't want you getting in their way? You are handing all your power to them.
You’re talking in hyperbole but… yeah, we do a ton of work to make roads safer than they might otherwise be. What purpose do you think pedestrian crossings serve?
... and if the owner of Omegle doesn't want to take the years it'd take (and tens of thousands in legal fees) to find out whether or not they're liable for a silly project they put together for fun, I can't fault 'em.
Yeah no this is a terrible take. She was coerced by being an 11 year old talking to a grown adult. How do you think she was coerced?
> coerce - persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats.
What was the threat? Why did she oblige? Why didn't she just block him?
If the guy was in another country, it's hard for me to imagine how she became a "digital sex slave" (how the article refers it) instead of just blocking the guy. Naturally I'd imagine there was some kind of blackmail for her to comply, but the article doesn't mention anything like that.
I've been the parent of a ten year old girl, and can say with confidence that it's within the realm of possibility that an adult could manipulate a child in ways that ultimately would make that child afraid, if not utterly terrified, to be disobedient.
You scraping and digging through the comments here imploring to know about how she was coerced suggests to me that what you're really looking for is a justification to blame the ten year old girl. "coercion implies a threat" implies that with no evidence of a threat, the girl must have played along. She must have liked it. That's the vibe you give as you dig in and keep demanding people prove there was a threat. I sincerely hope I'm wrong about that vibe.
I am just logging a protest, I have absolutely no interest in discussing it.
I apologize that you felt that it was an accusation. I could have been more tactful in expressing what my impressions were of your probing. I'm happy to be wrong.
How was she coerced? Who knows. I'll take a guess and say she was probably tricked at first into thinking he was someone else. Threatened after that.
(EDIT: and for chrissakes get identifiable information out of your user profile if you're going to argue this hard about something like this! Internet 101, man!)
And it is a pretty credible threat: https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/maryland-sk-court-case-... https://www.wnyc.org/story/9114-sexting-teens-legal-straits-...
Curiously enough, no one even thinks of holding the government/legal system responsible.
If the pedo found her at a walmart, would she sue walmart too?
Weird people, pedos, criminals are everywhere.... parents somehow teach about "stranger-danger" offline but not online, and then blame platforms their kids use, even though they are too young to use them in the first place.
Well, yes! A different example: with few exceptions (gun manufacturers), when people die everybody even remotely involved gets sued. Examples: Station Nightclub fire, Surfside condominium collapse..
In the case of a pedo at Walmart I could imagine: "Didn't the staff notice the guy dragging the girl out of the store? Why didn't they get involved?" Walmart has much more money than the pedo.
If you want a proper Walmart analogy then you should stick the child in a remote part of a vast parking lot, so that there's no reason to expect the staff to notice.
And at that point the case seems too weak to try.
And if Walmart had a thousand anonymous meeting rooms it wouldn't be Walmart anymore, so the analogy falls apart at that point.
Yes, meatspace public venues used by traffickers are frequently sued for enabling the trafficking [0], its not something unique to cyberspace venues.
[0] e.g., https://guestban.com/2023/07/12/the-unseen-side-of-luxury-ho...
Parents tend to assume that "the internet" is regulated, somehow, whether by laws or market pressures. The thinking goes something like "Instagram is safe, right, because how could it not be? It's used by so many people, and if it could harm our kids, how would it be allowed to exist?" - right or wrong, people expect platforms to be held to some standard, and, right or wrong, put trust in the platforms to meet their expectations of safety.
The thing about Omegle was that it very much was the private room scenario I described above. I left out the part that made the room "safe" - the eject button. But persuasive people can persuade other people, especially children, to avoid that eject button, and while that only happened to some of the 74 million people using the site, it happened to people. And for those it happened to, those encounters wouldn't haven't happened without Omegle's help.
If you don't believe that, consider all those commenting here about how unique and special Omegle was for people who were good to one another. There's, thankfully, a lot of those comments.
But both things can be true, and were true when Omegle was operating. With 74 million people using it, the smallest of fractions of a percent still represent more than zero people experiencing harm that Omegle enabled.
The parents blame the platforms because the platforms enabled the harm.
How about spoons? https://nypost.com/2019/05/16/police-station-mocked-for-phot...
We do in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives "It’s illegal to: use any knife or weapon in a threatening way, carry most knives or any weapons in public without a ‘good reason’, sell most knives or any weapons to anyone under the age of 18." - And yes that includes kitchen knives because there's a callout - "In Scotland, you’re allowed to sell 16 and 17 year olds cutlery and kitchen knives."
> "Asphyxiation is the leading method of teen suicide. Should we stop selling plastic, rope, and anything that fits around a neck and/or head?"
We regulate them or have standards around them[3]: "The Toy Safety Directive, BS EN 71-1, raises attention to plastic bags and plastic sheets. It specifies bags larger than 380mm opening circumference and having a drawstring closure must be made of a material which is permeable to air. Except where application requires airtight sealing, all bags are to be perforated with holes of 4mm diameter minimum, spaced on 30mm grid. Bags for child appealing products and toys must have a minimum of four holes; other bags to have a minimum of two holes".
Your stance "we shouldn't have to do things about dangers" is silly, we do a lot of things to reduce risks in a lot of areas. Learning from other people's tragedies and trying to safeguard others from having to go through them is one of the long-running threads of civilised society.
Should we restrict electric wiring options in houses because electrocution and fires are a thing? Yes. Should we restrict food production options because salmonella is a thing? Yes. Should we have building codes because shoddy buildings fall down and kill people? Yes. Should we have laws about lead and carcinogens and things in products? Yes. Should cars have to meet crash test safety conditions? Yes. etc. etc.
> "Should we put inflatable balloons around people because cars and high velocity objects exist that we can collide with?"
We do; drivers are surrounded by inflatable airbags. [rant] Look at the social messaging around bike helmets. You never see people telling runners to wear a helmet in case they suddenly come upon a head injury. But take say YouTuber Tom Stanton who makes unusual engineering projects, including a flywheel bike[1] which he rode at walking pace down an empty country lane, and in his next bike video, a homemade supercapacitor bike[2] he's wearing a a helmet because of all the flack he got in the comments on the earlier one.
The point is not whether helmets prevent against brain damage in certain situations, the point is what situations are casual everyday recreational cyclists getting into where they risk brain damage? And the answer is cars. And the social messaging for helmet wearing is to shift blame from car drivers hitting cyclists to cyclists "not taking safety precautions".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gahKxbwUcYw
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_f8Q2_Q_J0
[3] https://qualityinspired.co.uk/2020/03/suffocation-warning-re...
I'm not a fan of this journalist "ambushing" the founder at his property and staying outside of it until he gets some answers. "He has all the blinds closed" - right.
Let a judge determine whether the founder is in the wrong and needs to provide answers.
Sorry maybe it's the aspergers in me but I'm generally not a fan of these self-anointed judge, jury, and executioners performing public shaming rituals.
Personally, I think this is an entirely reasonable balance between competing rights. Publicly identifying suspects can cause immense harm to innocent people and prejudice the right to a fair trial based on the presumption of innocence. I cannot see any public interest argument for the general right to publicly identify criminal suspects, beyond mere prurient interest. If there would be substantial investigative benefits to publicly naming a suspect, for example to encourage witnesses or other victims to come forward, that should be a decision for the courts (or at least the police) and that decision should be made based on the individual circumstances of the case.
Until convicted, I presume?
Are the identites of those arrested (and possibly prosecuted but acquitted) protected forever?
Multi million Euro fraud, perpetrated for 10+ years in an organized fashion by husband and wife and some helpers from Saxony. Victims were (and are) senior citizens.
The German public broadcast MDR had several stories on them. Yet they don’t even dare to show the office building on which the perpetrators work. Much less their private house, or faces or names.
The press is more afraid of being sued by the perpetrators than the perpetrators are afraid of being prosecuted.
It’s the other extreme.
I'm starting to feel this is the thing we should have laws against.
Tracking down and trying to talk to those your sources have accused of wrongdoing to try and get their side of the story and to get them to speak on the record is kind of literally Investigative Reporting 101, and has been for actual centuries now.
Showing up and getting actual answers, sure, but if you chased me around yelling questions about why I'm not protecting the children I would 100% run away rather than give you an in-depth interview. It looks bad until you think about it for five seconds and realise how confronting the situation is to even an innocent man, just like the Reid technique etc.
Asking loaded questions and trying to aggressively ambush you is definitely not "getting the other side of the story".
In terms of ethics, I’ll side with the journalist’s here over the guy running a service that randomly matches adults with children for video chat when he didn’t immediately shut down the service for a top-to-bottom rethink the moment he found out it’d been used by a serial pedophile.
You can't shut down everything once a bad actor does heinous things. There would be nothing left around. No more streets, no more cafes, no more trash bins, no more cars. Nothing.
As it has been pointed out, omegle did arguably provide more protection against bad actors that lots of other services around today. If you're in a situation you don't like, just press next and it's over. Nobody can contact you or recognise you in any way.
The crimes happen when you're not anonymous anymore, after exchanging snapchat or instagram accounts for example. They don't happen in a months long omegle conversation.
The root of the problem is being careless and providing identifying information. Obviously kids are too young to understand all the dangers, that's what parents are for. You wouldn't let your kids alone in the middle of the city and then sue it when a pedophile gets access to them. You can't let your kids use the Internet without keeping an eye on what is going on and warning them of the perils.
I specified my issue (aspergers) for a reason. I would need legal and competent representation if I were accused of something.
We know from people that have actually consented to be in the public sphere (politicians, performers, etc) that even denying an accusation against you still leaves you a pariah with the scarlet letter, to be ostracized in some cases.
Smearing and destroying a person extra-judicially with no "burden of proof" to convict isn't something I'm okay with.
If there is legitimate wrongdoing of some kind, an investigation, carried out by the designated representatives (police, detectives, prosecutors) who are paid by our tax dollars and not by advertisers or the wealthy is what's preferable and actually representative.
Your actions as the officer of a company are generally considered to be "public".
You don't have a right to privacy over your business (you certainly don't have to answer questions from a journalist either, but they're not generally invading your privacy by merely asking them).
As for the reputational risk you’re pointing to, nothing here was trying to cancel him, ostracize him, etc… the journalist was, I think rightly, trying to pressure him into changing his business’s product to prevent the very real harm that product has been, unquestionably, used to perpetrate. There is a very legitimate question why he wasn’t doing more to prevent his platform’s weaponization when his platform was pretty much by design ripe for exactly that use case.
The legal process playing out rarely ever means that a judge or jury makes a decision, rather it usually plays out as an economic problem, one of "does everyone involved have 10s of thousands of dollars to burn".
Usually the answer is "no", so usually it settles out of court.