In that article she was 11 when using Omegle. She was using internet without appropriate supervision. That's almost like allowing a kid to drive a car, leading to an accident, and then trying to ban cars because they are dangerous to kids.
The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I don't think we want to close wikipedia.
The responsibility of internet platforms is needed, but it's not an excuse for parental neglect.
I don't know when you were born, but my relationship to the Internet started probably around the time I was 7 or 8. My school had computers with Internet, there were two computers at home. My parents could have limited my Internet use but they couldn't have stopped me. There is not a guard standing by every computer stopping me from being Online if I am under 18 years of age.
I still don't think Omegle is at fault, but we have to assume kids are on the Internet.
I've been on the internet since I was about 10 years old (I estimate). My parents knew (and understood) maybe 10% of what I did on there. As a minor, I did multiple criminal things online, some of them successful, others not so much. If I was a kid in 2023, I probably would've been arrested at some point in time.
Because of what I know about the internet and because I know what kids will do with unlimited access, I think much of this burden should be with the parents. For every successful Omegle taken down, 3 more unknown ones will pop up. But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.
As long as parents are never held accountable for their kids online behavior and the blame is put on service providers, this will only get worse. I know many examples of parents who track their kids' phones because they're scared something will happen to them in the real world. Meanwhile, these same parents pay no attention at all to where their kids venture in the online world, let alone with who. Parents need to be educated on this, fast.
I've been on the internet since I was a similar age. I even obeyed all my parents' instructions (e.g. no using Google, no social media), but it's really only me being a certain kind of person – and a little luck – that kept me in any way resembling safe. Those rules, as stated to me, were absolutely not sufficient (e.g. I used Bing, and joined forums, and booted into QuickWeb to play The Fancy Pants Adventures because that wasn't disabling the filter). No way were my parents capable of policing my activity.
I, uh, mostly kept my parents in the loop, I guess? But they had to intervene and fix my messes on more than one occasion, and those were all things I hadn't told them about (some of which I even realised were big deals before they blew up). I'm quite lucky that none of that stuff's come back to bite me yet. (I don't think any of it was criminal, but that's pure serendipity: I had zero idea what the laws surrounding internet activity were, and I could easily have made an enemy of multiple governments without even knowing I should probably ask my parents about this cool new programming idea I had.)
The places I frequent these days are all safe for the kind of child I was, but the internet is much, much bigger than that – and, I suspect, more hostile than it was. I have no illusions that I could provide good, useful guidelines to a ten-year-old today.
> But major platforms like TikTok are also massive sources of grooming and parents happily give their 10 year olds a smart phone.
I've never used TikTok, but I find myself scrolling through Instagram reels quite often. It's so addicting. Recently, I've been seeing some extreme gore: people being lit on fire, bones snapping, fatal car accidents, sexually explicit content (cheating, etc.), etc.
It's gotten to the point of me no longer wanting to watch those reels - they're very, very dark and depressing. If children are seeing this stuff as well, that's a major problem.
I volunteer in my local public school in the US. The sad fact is that stable family structure, by any definition, is collapsing and that kids are suffering. The percentage of kids in grade school who have an absent, incarcerated, addicted, mentally unhealthy, or generally dysfunctional parent is off the charts.
Parents who are unable to give their kids the tools they need to avoid getting shunted into special education on account of their behavior are in no position to supervise their online activity.
I make a habit of looking up kids parents on FB - it generally tracks that the worse the kids behavior and educational outlook, the greater the parent’s (singular in most cases) social media presence. I’m no longer surprised when I find a mother’s Onlyfans link, FFS.
Where I live a full 1/3 of 1st graders are in a special education track. All the research points to the impact of the home and family on these outcomes.
Tl;dr many parents are incapable of the rational parenting you suggest.
There is no _one_ reason, and I don't present that particular phenomenon as a causal factor but as a symptom of the greater problem - which certainly includes poverty but is even more closely aligned to the opioid epidemic.
All this is in the context of asking parents to provide their children the guidance required to avoid child-inappropriate content.
My point stands: a large and growing contingent of parents lack the stability/ability/support required to even keep their children's behavior within acceptable boundaries. It's a fool's errand to think keeping kids away from bad actors on the internet can be added to their plate.
you'll grant however that when we were young, it was more of an unknown wild west. Parents didn't know what to make of it or fear, there was generally more freedom afforded. We were the first generation with stupid-easy access to pirated pornography. No one had any idea of health concerns, at best you heard a blanket moral stance that didn't convince anyone.
I think today parents have access to far better means of regulating access, should they so choose, and they're more conscious of it. I'm not saying it's fool-proof, but the overhead is enough to dissuade kids from spending too much time and getting into trouble.
The legal situation is more complicated than blaming the parents. To extend your analogy: If someone had a business that rented cars and somehow 11 year olds were renting the cars and driving them, the rental car company couldn’t shrug it off and blame the parents.
That’s why this is complicated: If a business knows criminal or dangerous activity is taking place on their platform, there is some obligation to make a good faith effort to address the situation. The expectation isn’t perfect enforcement because it’s not reasonable to shut every large business down as soon as 1 incident occurs, but if a platform becomes known as a haven for certain types of behavior then their liability continues to go up. Given how many people in this thread are joking about how Omegle was known as a free-for-all platform for people exposing themselves and as a platform for bored kids, it’s not surprising that the lawsuits are coming. Also, given their limited monetization options it’s not surprising that they choose to close rather than deal with legal battles.
Did the 11 year old set up and pay for internet access?
Sounds more like an 11 year old stole their parents' rental car and the family turned around and sued the rental car company. It's a stretch to even suggest Omegle was akin to "rental car company" since they didn't charge, it was more like a P2P car sharing app.
Every form of social media is an open window for groomers and filled with abuse. You just don't see it as openly, and it's often relegated to DMs. But Instagram, X, Snapchat, Discord, Reddit, YouTube etc... and there are hundreds of influencers who use TikTok or other platforms to market their OnlyFans content, sometimes specifically focusing on younger demographics.
Focusing on nothing but parental neglect doesn't do much for the victims, though.
Are we to look at all the kids that get groomed and manipulated by predators on a platform like Omegle and say "lol that sucks, wish you had better parents tho" or can we also elevate our expectations of platforms that connect kids to adults?
For a platform that connects kids to rando adults, I would expect some sort of filter. Even a $1 join fee would have been better than what Omegle had (nothing).
That video would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
The reporters literally camped outside this guys house, ran across his lawn shouting at him, chased him to his door, and immediately accused him of harming children. Then the scene cuts to the reporter describing that as a “civil conversation”.
Slippery slope fallacy. How many people are pedophiles? How many people who aren't will need to give up their rights so that that minority... actually just keeps on doing what they do, because there's always alternatives?
Isn't the issue, this place makes no effort to protect children? More like, a public park next to a sex offender halfway house. Keep your children away from that place.
Nobody but you is suggesting we protect the rights of pedophiles. This argument is going where it always goes ... as the author pointed out. There are bad people in the world. They make up a small percentage of the population. You don't change society as a whole based on the behavior of these bad people. You do what is reasonable and within your ability. Did you even read article? By your logic would you allow the Catholic church to exist? They were literally protecting pedophiles for years.
Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Telegram, WhatsApp, Zoom and all those companies with UGC have this, responsible ones report it (Meta does lots, not sure Twitter does anymore, Telegram never did).
> I don't get how they can sue Omegle for this.
Take it as a sign that if tech community doesn't wake up and own up to this and try to solve the issue somehow then not just individual services but the entire idea of e2ee messaging is going to become illegal...
Orders of magnitude more grooming and misconduct is done over SMS than was ever done over Omegle.
Is it up to telecom engineers to “wake up” and own that they’re facilitating this abuse? It seems like one of those finger pointing cases which falls apart when any level of scrutiny is applied.
A large portion of commentators here greatly dislike the idea of unmonitored interactions between humans. Their ideal is that every person's cellphone continuously records nearby conversations and sends them to the police where they can run large language models to provide a shortlist of dangerous communications that a policeman can then look at and charge for.
We all know this is not true, not even close. Read through the comments here, there's a clear overwhelming majority opinion blaming the family rather than the company. Even beyond this post, I've never seen this called for on this site.
You are in a clear majority position but still pretend to be persecuted and victimized by an imagined boogeyman.
I agree I'm in the majority here on hackernews, but I'm also in the minority in my country (the UK) given the monitoring provisions now required by social media companies and where private communication of ideas between individuals is punishable[1].
> Orders of magnitude more grooming and misconduct is done over SMS
Yeah, you should bring up snail mail next.
Even if we imagine someone using SMS in this day and age, still no one uses it to send photos or videos or broadcast live abuse.
> Is it up to telecom engineers to “wake up”
For better or worse a lot of what they do is considered essential service (calling emergency, disaster response etc).
e2ee messaging isn't essential, and yes ordinary non-tech people are waking up to harmful uses of it. If tech industry doesn't own up to that and work to combat those, someone else will and in that case rest assured you will not like the result:)
That would be a reasonable solution if there would be any government who could provide a digital attestation scheme that allows to prove attributes without giving out the identity. Afaik it's possible technically. Just not wanted apparently
Like proving I am at least 18 years old without giving out my birth date or name.
Read the article.
I don't understand the logic of this.
It's like leaving loaded gun on the desk and its gun fault (tool) when your kid shoot someone with it.
IMO this is bad parenting.
Any tool that provide anonimity and privacy can be abused.
It is not like anyone was forced to use it. You have to go there explicitly.
Adding random video chat to i.e Signal app makes it another Omegle "problem" ?
so when are they going after google for providing free email and such?
internet watch foundation is about censorship. they only "protect the children" so you can't contradict them without looking like a criminal. they actually give criminals a legal defense as their content hash system is easy to prove a false positive.
also they are going after the only service which contributed to arrests. lol. you think criminals don't use facebook/Instagram/telegram/tiktok/email/googlemeet/msteams/etc just because you haven't heard about arests?!
The internet is a great place, but it's an adult place. You can find absolutely horrible (adult) things on wikipedia that a kid should not be learning about at the age of 11. And I don't think we want to close wikipedia.
The responsibility of internet platforms is needed, but it's not an excuse for parental neglect.