Omegle: "How I got the dangerous chat site closed down" (opens in new tab)

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.

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38199355

I can't tell if the last line "I thank A.M. for opening my eyes to the human cost of Omegle." is meant to be Grade-A sarcasm, or sincere.

Edit: well, after carefully rereading the post, it must be Grade-A sarcasm.

I admire your optimism. The only times section 230 has been brought up on the hill in the last decade as been in, admittedly performative and doomed to fail, calls to get rid of it entirely.

can you ELI5? i have no idea what any of what you wrote means :D

"She" was working with (I am tempted to say "fell into the hands of") an advocacy organization which handled the lawsuit. The purpose of the suit wasn't ever to collect compensation for anything. It was to harass Omegle, and to intimidate Omegle and others. Demanding a lot of money damages was part of that. Driving Omegle out of business was a grade-A success even if she got zero money.

> Never realised that Omegle had become a platform for the creeps.

Everything can and potentially will be. Facebook, Discord, Ome.tv, Matrix rooms, Roblox, whatever.

> 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.

This (she) is why we can't have nice (non-corporate) things

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 are probably going to need to bite the bullet and at a minimum not allow interaction between anonymous users and children. That probably will require some sort of age verification.

Age verification can be done in a way that doesn't reveal anything to the site other than that the person is not a child and doesn't reveal to anyone other than the site that the person visited the site. But it can also be done in a way that gives the site much more information and reveals to third parties that you visited the site.

It might be a good idea for people concerned about privacy to get ahead on this one, recognize that age verification is probably going to become a requirement, and instead of just lobbying against all age verification also work to ensure that when that fails and we do get mandated age verification we get the kind that only reveals age to the site and doesn't reveal to anyone else what site age was verified for.

Well parents should be responsible for looking after their children, but laws exist partly to protect the vulnerable. Not everyone has parents who are up to the job for one reason or other - that doesn't mean the law doesn't have a role in protecting them. In fact I would argue that the law has a greater role in that case. Lots of products have mandatory child-safe protections built in (eg bottles of bleech are required to have a child-safe cap) so we as a society have decided that some protections over and above defering to parents can be appropriate for products that can cause harm.

I don't know Omegle so don't know what the balance should be here, but lots of tech products are built with a "move fast, figure out the complicated bits later", which is right but which doesn't fit well with these sorts of nuances.

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.