Skout Facing Sex-Predator Crisis | Hacker News Reader

Skout Facing Sex-Predator Crisis

blogs.wsj.com

52 pointsjordhy25 comments

Having operated a service similar in some ways to Skout, banning underage users is not the answer if you actually want to help them[1]. These same users will now sign up again but say they're 18+.

It's much better to encourage people to be honest and use that information to try and make the service safer, either through special features and app behavior or through user education. Nothing is perfect though, and no matter what you do some people will make bad decisions in spite of your best efforts to help them.

[1] If you're just covering your ass though, it's perfect. "The user lied! It's not our fault!"

I think you're a bit confused. The issue is not teens posing as adults, but sexual predators posing as teens. Appeals to the sense of honesty of perpetrators of sex crimes are likely misguided.

He's not confused at all. He's saying that by forcing teens to pose as adults to continue using the app, they can no longer help educate teens about how to avoid predators, nor offer them specific features to help them, because they won't know who they are. It's not the sex predators those features are for, it doesn't matter that they'd ignore them.

Perhaps in theory, but realistically this makes no sense. This is not a pornography site, where there is some taboo prize for lying about one's age. It's a social network, only as useful as the number of connections a user has on it. What is the likelyhood that a teen, and enough of their friends, will sign up again under a false name and somehow work out a system for determining the false names of all their friends? The benefit to the staggering minority of teens that would have been receptive to a sexual predator awareness message from an _iPhone app not at all sexual in nature_ is far outweighed by the overt protection of all teens using the service. How popular do you think it will likely be amongst pedophilies without potential victims?

I'm pretty sure Skout is for meeting new people. So they'll just sign up with the same names and a different email, and start fresh. In fact, we had to start blocking problem users by unique device ID. Nothing else would deter them.

Pedophiles will target them using largely the same methods as before: mainly scrolling through pictures. Sure, search won't help as much, but it's hardly a deterrent.

From my naive perspectice it seems that you can apply different age-verification techniques if your target audience is older.

From the article: > Kremen believes credit cards might be a potential avenue to online identity verification. But Wiklund says, “Teens don’t generally have credit cards.”

If you are targeting an older audience, maybe age verification through Credit cards is a viable tactic?

I had a credit card when I was a teenager. A check card, actually, but I don't think any website would have known the difference.

But the bank presumably knew your real age, address, and personal details? I was interpreting the bank to act as an age-verifier in some way rather than the mere possession of a card.

Upon reflection there are privacy concerns that would make me leery of seeing this implemented in practice, but that has rarely stopped people before.

There has to be a better strategy. When I was a teen I would put the wrong age in sites so I could see content that I otherwise wouldn't be able to. That is what teens will do now. The CEO needs to come up with alternatives or they have not solved the problem. And may lead to accidental statutory rapes which would obviously not be good either.

Perhaps, but shutting down teen access shifts potential liability from the company to the lying children.

There's another possible point here: preventing people from signing up as teens ups the difficulty for targeting teens.

This is rather perplexing. I mean, first of all, this isn't really Skout's problem. Yes, there is a problem with sexual predators using the internet to find victims, but banning teens from Skout doesn't actually do anything to prevent that.

Secondly, if this is how they were going to react in this scenario, what the hell was Skout thinking letting minors sign up in the first place? Were they just hopelessly naïve?

This reminds me of a fictional story on HN a few months back. The author presented a case where he wakes up and his app goes viral. Investors flood his voicemail and he's suddenly making millions. However, something tragic happens with his app and all the investor pull their support.

Does anyone else remember this story and have the link?

That doesn't sound like fiction to me.

Yes, the fictional app was called sore goggles

here is the HN link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3699912

That's it! Thanks.

I'm really impressed with the response from Skout on this. "I would take 100% revenue hit to keep our users safe if I had to.” Here's hoping they find a good solution.

Every time I see some tool use the word "community" when referring to any online forum, chat room, etc. it makes me gag. It is just so inherently wrong.

You could just as easily refer to any lynch mob as a community.

This blog post, dated May 2012, rants about a purported Skout ad that came up while playing Words With Friends

http://joeymarsilio.blogspot.com/2012/05/flirting-with-disas...

Assuming that it's real (I read comments from other sites complaining about an ad described as depicted), it's easy to see why critics felt the service was too forward in pandering to sexualitied teens.

I will mention it again since it is still being discussed:

I wrote something out of concern for this issue and posted it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4109759

The annual rate of sex crime victimization for people age 12-17 is 1/1500. Skout had about 2M users in that demographic, so we would expect about 1300 Skout kids per year to be attacked, or 3.6 per day, in the normal course of events. It sounds like Skout is increasing the rate by one victim per week, which is a risk increase of a few percent. That's actually pretty damn good for a service that connects kids to anonymous strangers.

Furthermore, the kind of kid who meets anonymous Internet strangers without proper precautions is likely to have a much higher than background rate of victimization due to their behavior. So it is likely that many of the Skout victims have simply converted their attack from offline to online.

Skout appears to be conducting a witch hunt against themselves. Whoops.

This reasoning is flawed. No one said that there weren't teenagers who were the victim of a sex crime and also happened to be Skout users. Rather, the issue is that the platform was being used by sexual predators as a tool to facilitate initial contact with teenagers they otherwise wouldn't have had access to.

Additionally, it's likely that an overwhelming proportion of those represented in the statistic you cited were victimized by someone they knew rather than a stranger over the internet. For a fair comparison, those victims would need to be excluded. Not to mention the question of what portion of those 2 million users are active enough on Skout to even represent a realistic target. Multiple cases being reported (in the US alone) within a span of days is unlikely enough to warrant drastic action.

The point is that the Internet allows us to search for freakishly unlikely events. The only valid way to decide whether those events are acceptable is by comparing them to events we have already decided ARE acceptable. We have decided that it's acceptable for a few dozen American adolescents to be raped each week. Increasing that rate by at most a few percent is not a cause for panic, nor a reason to put them all under communications house arrest.

"... otherwise wouldn't have had access to."

If they are spending their energy on Internet meetings, it is certain that they will have less energy to spend on in-person acquaintenances. There is probably a very strong substitution going on. The teenager who is open to the molester next door is certainly even more open to the exciting mysterious molester from the next town.

Where's the 1/1500 annually stat from? I googled, to no avail

I don't remember now. It was some academic website with crime stat analysis, and it matched my mental estimate of a conservative number. Frankly the true rate is likely to be quite a bit higher.

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