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I feel this is a big win for her, she obviously suffered a horrible trauma and this website was what facilitated that.
I don't know how this is a win for the internet. This was a website that clearly said "we connect random strangers", and they did, and a fucked up thing happened as an improbable event based on human nature. It doesn't seem to be caused by some fundamental aspect of the way the website works. I don't really know how this could have been avoided. How would the website know who is a pedophile? How would the website know who is a child? I can't think of a way without fundamentally changing user identity on the internet. I'm not sure what this means for anonymous internet interactions.
This reminds me of Greyhound getting sued after a murder on their bus.
I don't like the implications of either. All responsibility for a crime should lie with the criminal, not the operator of the venue in which it occurred. In the case of Greyhound, it resulted in them frisking people boarding busses and banning pocket knives. In the case of Omegle, the site shut down. Both times, I think the world got a little bit worse.
I miss when Omegle was just text based. I made a friend from Czechia on there back in 2011.
Opening up video chats was asking for this to happen.
In retrospective, it feels unreal that the site made it this far into 2023
ChatRoulette is still around, which is nuts. That place was a cesspit 10 years ago, can't imagine now.
Hello from Czechia.
As much as omegle was a cesspit, there are already even sketchier alternatives up and running. This will be a wild goose chase with no end in sight unless sites like this get rid of all privacy and log every single interaction and step up their moderation.
Like piracy sites and other illegal/grey areas, take one source down and two more will appear, or however the saying goes.
These sites are the glory holes of the internet.
Next year the city park will be forced to close down after the council was sued for by a woman who was allowed to meet a paedophile in it as a child.
Children need to be taught how to not get abused by strangers offline and online. If they aren't, it's not the fault of the place that allowed them to meet. When I was a child I was using the internet to talk to adults and had a great time. (The adults who had to deal with my crappy attitude before I learnt some netiquette probably had a less great time...)
Taught not to get abused? I think you mean “stranger danger” shit, which is taught but the way you phrased that is disturbing. It’s not a child’s job to “not get abused by ‘anyone’”. And all places in general should probably keep an eye on who comes in and out, except for niche/specialized services like vpns, warez, etc. That’s just called being responsible.
Parks and other ‘loose’ non-stores though shouldn’t be held responsible, I agree.
I just wanted a phrase which encompassed "don't go home with strangers" and "don't send strangers photos of yourself" and all other things which either are, or lead to, abuse.
A very large percentage of child abuse, kidnapping and pedo issues involve the child’s own family. “Stranger Danger” isn’t the solution.
In the very specific set of examples in the above posts, it's basically only "Stranger Danger". It's literally about Omegle.
But I do very much agree with your point when talking in a wider context
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That doesn't have any bearing on a comparison between two different types of "stranger danger".
You forget that children can be easily manipulated as their brains are literally not capable of proper judgement in most situations
Mm, I guess that's why the park needs to be shut/we can never let children go there unattended.
I really don't understand how you can "force" anyone to do anything over Omegle but I guess that's neither here nor there. The more important point is that it would have been better to take the opportunity to catch more pedos doing the same thing on this site. They're still out there just moved to different platforms now. It's not really the win she thinks it is. There's HIGHLY questionable/NSFL stuff even on TikTok and Google Photos.
Poor Peter File. Dude gets a bad wrap.
Hey Peter! 👨🦽
Wow! I haven't heard of omegle since I left memebase in 2013.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
"I feel personal pride that no more children will be added to Omegle's body count," says the woman who successfully forced the infamous chat site to shut down.
Speaking for the first time since the platform was taken offline, "Alice" or "A.M." as she's known in court documents, tells the BBC she demanded the website's closure as part of an out-of-court settlement.
Omegle's popularity rose during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, and was the subject of a BBC investigation which revealed that prepubescent boys were found to be explicitly touching themselves in front of strangers.
On Friday, a week after Leif Brooks closed his chat service with a lengthy statement, he added a sentence at the bottom: "I thank A.M. for opening my eyes to the human cost of Omegle."
Cyber Correspondent Joe Tidy speaks exclusively with child abuse survivor "Alice" and her legal team, as they prepare a case that could have major consequences for social media companies.
Alice's case is a legal landmark, as most social media lawsuits in the US are dismissed under a catch-all protection law called Section 230, which exempts companies from being sued for things that users do on their platforms.
The original article contains 1,218 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Omegle got shut down?
Myeah.