BBC: The woman who successfully sued the website that matched her with a paedophile explains how she forced the site to close down. ‘Alice’, or A.M. as she was known in court says she feels "vindic…::“Alice” speaks exclusively to the BBC after her successful lawsuit against Omegle forced it offline.
I don’t get it. So someone let 11 yo kid use internet unmonitored and it’s the Internet’s fault? Isn’t it up to parents to know when their kid can go on the internet alone?
Spoken like a true non-parent and someone who forgot about everything they got away with as a youth.
I didn’t have internet until I was able to take responsibility for what I do with it. Not because my parents were so smart but because it simply wasn’t available where I lived. The only thing that affected me negatively for life was religion and I totally believe my parents are responsible, not the bible.
I think I should be able to sue the direct connect pedophile site.
And if pedophile facetimes your kid you’re going to sue Apple?
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.
It means what it has meant since the first fifty seconds someone used chat roulette or uno on Xbox
Random unmoderated sites like this are horrifying and a danger to both people and society.
There are arguments to be made about moderation in general. But this is not a high capacity rifle with questionable purpose. This is a pistol where the barrel is pointed backwards
I can see your argument that you shouldn’t meet strangers in a private place. I mean in real life you would go to a public space if you wanted to meet new people rather than invite strangers into your living room. That wouldn’t be safe and people who facilitate that would be pretty irresponsible. That’s basically what omegle was doing.
I might be coming around. I think this will have to be very carefully managed to avoid slipping too far. There are already conservatives pushing for mandatory government ID check for viewing adult material online. I could easily see that same narrative pushed here. I think there is a real danger to the kind of censorship that is created when anonymity is removed by mandate from the internet.
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.
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.
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.
Omegle got shut down?
