That's is an exceedingly dickish move that should be below the BBC.
> Yells at the man's house "Why aren't you protecting children?"
> Turns to camera "I just wanted to have a civil conversation. He doesn't want to talk... ever"
Sure man, civil conversation.
On balance I still think Omegle should win the case, but I don't think it's entirely without merit.
After all, no grooming happened on omegle, that's just where they shared contact details. Grooming apparently happened on other platforms, and the common denominator seems to be the internet and everything that makes it work, not omegle.
"The young woman, identified only as A.M., sought $22 million in damages in her lawsuit. Omegle was shut down days after the two sides agreed to settle the lawsuit."
Platforms with an army of lawyers would never greenlight Omegle's basic behavior, to start with.
Here's Chatroulette's login screen:
And from Archive.org, here's how Omegle's looked when the girl who is now suing them joined the site. "Tiny text" isn't an exaggeration. The call to action to start a text chat is a 200x50 button -- the 'don't use if you're under 13' text is 0.75em font:
It should be obvious to everyone, not just 'some lawyer' that the former is more of a barrier than the latter. There's also the concept of overt acts in many statutes - lying to a website by clicking a button that says "I'm over 18" when you're not demonstrates that you read the disclaimer and disregarded it, where you can plausibly claim you never saw the copy when it's just legalese on the bottom of the page.
The BBC article above states that Omegle is being mentioned in 50 pedophilia cases in the last 2 years. If 20% of kids would be scared to click "I'm older than 13", that would be 10 cases fewer.
We shouldn't just take zealous well-paid lawyers as a fact of nature. If those "defense against lawsuits"-actions actually don't make a difference in terms of reducing child abuse, then we should not let them make a difference in the legal system either.
That's assuming the evidence I would like to actually see.
Age limits can have a perverse effect on kids, or even young adults, eager to prove to themselves and their peers how "mature" they are. Retail stores and clubs where I live have exploited this for a long time.
For instance, there is no government-imposed limits on the age you need to be to buy energy drinks, but the grocery stores have coordinated to institute a 15 year limit. I'm pretty sure they do this simply to increase sales, not over concern for overcaffeinated kids.
They also used to have big signs saying "Over 18? PROVE IT!" with a big foaming glass of beer. I'm sure that flew over the head of most adults, but there was nothing about showing ID there.
Chatroulette, the one most similar to Omegle, like Omegle, was started by a teenager alone (at about the same time), with the additional advantage (from the point of vulnerability to civil liability) of being in Russia.
But even so, they very early on faced the same kind of criticism as Omegle, shifted to registration-required and adults-only very early on, had an easier way to report inappropriate content, automatic temporary bans for too many reports too close together, and adopted other mitigations beyond what Omegle has.
Over the years, the handful of times I’ve gone on CR, I’ve never seen any form of required registration or age verification beyond maybe an “I’m 18+” checkbox or something.
EDIT: Admittedly I know little of the history of these groups. Comments suggest I may be in error on my inferences here.
Didn’t they used to specifically and notably not care about this? See ACLU defense of neo nazi march.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/aclu-johnn...
I think the ACLU is still a good organization, but it's no longer the ACLU. It should be monomaniacal and universally despised.
> It should be monomaniacal and universally despised.
Never thought I’d get whiplash just from reading a comment on Hacker News.
Not anymore. The Charlottesville incident was the straw that broke the camel's back [0][1][2].
There was a revolt from donors and plenty of lawyers against their stance during Charlottesville.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/opinion/aclu-first-amendm...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/opinion/sunday/free-speec...
But that's the rub, PEACEABLY. Clearly what happened in Charlottesville violated that and is no longer protected under the constitution. But we can't ever truly predict the actions of an individual in a large group.
I'm very torn. I feel like we veer into Minority Report if we start having to predict what assemblies are prone to violation or not.
I suspect the ACLU has refined its opinion on the nature of freedoms. Or the public that funds it has and it realized that it can't do any good if donors pull support because it keeps supporting Nazis. Maybe distinction without a difference.
Of all the targets of ire for "woke culture" etc., I'm really surprised that ACLU, SPLC and similar aren't getting more heat. They're actually highly consequential in people's daily lives and can clearly be ideologically captured by a rather small group of people, given that the orgs themselves are so small.
Much better targets of critique than random Twitter mobs.
On the other hand, I do wonder if "talk to strangers" is indeed a reasonable model. Our brains form largely on the basis of neurons talking and connecting to strangers. Clearly that model works there. But then again the neurons are simple (relatively) cells with much more cohesive goals and behavior, while humans are complex entities with behavior ranging from the cooperative to the ghastly predatorial.
Ultimately it seems any such service can't be anonymous. Talk to strangers... fine. But you need to register first, with your name, face, age, and meet consequences for what you're doing on the service, if your intent is less than noble. Alas this takes people and money which Omegle apparently didn't have.
This is nonsense. Our neurons don’t talk to strangers. They talk with other neurons from the same individual. There is more in common between any two connected neurons than between two family members.
And besides there is no reason to think that what happens between cells is a good model to base human behaviour on whatsoever.
Socialization is important (we have decades of documentation on how you can permanently damage a brain in mere weeks of solitary confinement), and we can't nor shouldn't have to base that socialization with the same relatives for your entire life. If only because we biologically have urges to reproduce and are aware enough of biology to know that family reproduction is a horrible idea.
I just point it out that it is a bad one.
> Socialization is important.
Yes.
> we have decades of documentation on how you can permanently damage a brain in mere weeks of solitary confinement
Yes.
> and we can't nor shouldn't have to base that socialization with the same relatives for your entire life
Yes.
see how easy it was to write it without asserting falsehoods about neurons, and without drawing unsupported conclusions from said falsehood?
A metaphor can be faulty even if the conclusion it purports to end up with is true. And if we can do away without the obscuring metaphor (as you did in this very comment I'm responding to) then we should.
Thank you.
> Your claim is we must only communicate with our families.
No. Please read my comment again. I claim no such thing.
Really, I’d like to flip the script here and dare anyone against EFF protecting Omegle to post their real life resume/linkedin/etc.
I’ll do my part to make sure you’re unhirable, because the “optics” of destroying something as simple and innocent as this are terrible, and what’s actually happening is pseudo-anonymous pressure.
When Trump got elected, donations poured in to them amd they made a pretty clear turn to liberal causes. I think the days that they would defend the speech of deeply unpopular viewpoints on free speech grounds are over.
This is their plea for donations: "Abortion care, trans people’s right to live freely, people’s right to vote – our freedoms are at stake and we need you with us. Donate today and fuel our fight in courts, statehouses, and nationwide."
Now I am not saying these are bad causes but it seems their priorities have shifted. They don't seem to be defending deeply unpopular people anymore
But they’re mostly irrelevant anymore - the causes they’ve started going after have a thousand other non-profits doing as much for, or better now.
The ACLU war chest has been over $400M the last few years, with many thousands of people in pretty much every state working with the organization in some capacity.
There's absolutely no evidence to support your claims that either the ACLU is irrelevant, nor that it has somehow shifted its momentum considerably since 2016 in what class of cases it handles (especially given the age of the organization and number of shifts vs. overall societal/cultural changes).
On the contrary, I can find many recent examples of legal actions spread headed by the ACLU across dozens of issues all over the country. If you can't find any it's because you're not looking, though you can start with their Annual Reports.
I got my impression from following the actual court cases and related news. Weird eh?
But go ahead and project all you want.
Hard to square this assessment with the last news item I caught about the ACLU: fighting a gag order against Donald Trump on free speech grounds.
The NY Times has covered the internal friction in the ACLU to take on more progressive causes as well. I was wrong to say they have completely strayed from defending speech absolutely but they do seem to have moved focus away. [1]
1.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
Can we sit down and define it, or are we to forever just throw it around as a convenient "bad people"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...