No it shouldn't have any such obligation, because it explicitly stated minors were not to enter on its front page. Do you expect car manufacturers to make driving safe for children too?
Until October 2022 the terms of service stated that users 13+ could use the site with parents permission, between the Sept 30th [1] and Oct 6th [2] the terms changed to 18+ (a couple of months after the A.M. lawsuit was filed, or at least the 2nd amended complaint was).
"In or about 2014" (the lawsuits wording) A.M. was paired with the abuser the terms stated " Do not use Omegle if you are under 13. If you are under 18, use it only with a parent/guardian's permission." [3]
I'm not saying they had an obligation legally, but personally thinking if you allow minors on a site esp, where you know people get their junk out to flash to other users, you prob should segregate those <18 yo and those >=18 yo. How you do that effectively? I dunno, but age gating (even minimal age gating) makes easier to argue that people are willfully misrepresenting themselves to your service and can't be expected to police EVERY user on the site, esp when they lie to you about their age. (Also would have helped against the claims that Omegle were serving ads for adult sites to minors too).
EDIT: However, taking from the lawsuit
> 39. In or about 2014, the Omegle Predator logged onto Omegle and was paired via text chat with A.M., an 11-year-old girl living with her family in Michigan. This was A.M.’s first time using Omegle alone. Other times, she and her friends had used it to have age-appropriate video chats at sleepovers.
> 40. On the Omegle platform, the Omegle Predator asked A.M. her age to which she responded, “Eleven.” The Omegle Predator continued the conversation and convinced A.M. that it was okay for them to keep communicating.
> 41. By the end of this 15-minute chat, A.M. found herself believing the Omegle Predator and trusting that he would help her “feel better”—something he had promised her.
> 42. The Omegle Predator asked A.M. for her contact information so they could stay in touch after the video chat ended
> 43. That same night, the Omegle Predator strategically gained A.M.’s trust and induced A.M. to send him photos of herself. First of her smile, and eventually, of her breasts, vagina, and other parts of her body. The Omegle Predator convinced A.M. that it was integral to her “healing” to trust him even if she felt uncomfortable
So I'm not 100% sure that anything bad even happened between A.M. and the predator on Omegle (Though I still skimming though the complaint) but then happened off-site afterwards. Not sure how you can police users interactions when they take conversations off-site.
EDIT 2: Also A.M. stated in the initial chat that she was 11, so wasn't allowed to use the site per Omegle's terms, but as in other cases, if sites "know" they have users below the age of 13 and are collecting personal information about those people they are running a foul of COPPA (just to name one child protection law).
EDIT 3: Would have been an interesting "Product Liability" case if it had gone to trial, plaintiffs argument seems to be "because omegle knew it had issues in the past with predators using the site, they should have and could have done more to protect others using the site from such predators, and so the product itself is faulty". Defense would prob said something along the lines of "no bad actions between A.M. and her abuser happened on the site during their initial chat, they then took their chat off-site, omegle can't be expected to police users off-site." among other defenses. Personally I believe it would be a crapshoot on an outcome because in civil cases its not "beyond a reasonable doubt" but a "preponderance of the evidence" (more likely to be true than false) and jurors don't like it when bad things happen to children.
Yes, they should. The moment they don't allow minors in their site they have to implement the measures to enforce it.
Omegle became a safe haven for pedophiles and sex predators, and they are responsable for enabling them and not protecting their users.
There are other chat and video-chat sites that not only enforce their rules, they protect their users and ban those who don't follow the rules.
No, don't expect that from car manufacturers, they make cars not rules. Omegle, instead, made 'the car' and the rule not allowing minors in the site to avoid their responsibilities by law. They didn't enforce that rule and endangered them.
By your logic, as it reads to me, every porn site, adult novel, car, hunting rifle, vape, and can of beer, is responsible if an underage user is harmed.
They must implement technical measures to accurately detect if someone is underage?
All these things should be banned until this technology exists?
Omegle cannot perfectly protect their users from other users, and cannot determine who is a minor without ID verification (as we have seen in Virginia and Mississippi for porn sites).
They clearly want the entire product category illegal. Omegle might be gone, but many similar services remain.
Does Discord or Zoom enforce their rules? How other sites like icanhazchat enforce that rule? Omegle didn't care about their own rules, endangering minors.
It never ceases to disturb me when an individual expresses pride in censoring something legal out of existence. This isn't an isolated case either, there are numerous individuals, deserving of even less sympathy, engaged in the gleeful destruction of the web and net neutrality.
Interesting, product liability suits will cause app operators to actually respond differently, instead of ignoring the suit hoping it goes away under section 230.
I think this more likely gets Congress to expand section 230 to improve the shield, before working on the exceptions again
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.
Never realised that Omegle had become a platform for the creeps. She sued for $22 million. I don't see anything heroic in that, despite her tragic circumstances. 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.
"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.
Huh? Where did you get the idea that she didn't get any money? The article says - "But she now says settling out of court for an undisclosed sum earlier this month was better for her and others."
> 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.
Except you have their IP so if theycommited a crim you could directly identify them via the ISP and then you also have a video of them so you can prove itsthem using the device... so actually sounds like it gibes you everything you need
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.
I rather ban children of the internet and have the parents be liable for what ever happens to their children if they still go online. Children didn’t have access to the internet for thousands of years and they survived.
What happens if a child uses a computer at a friend's house to go online and something bad happens? Is it still the child's parents who are liable, or would it be the parents of the friend who are liable? What about a public computer like at a library?
Banning children from the internet would probably require any computer that a child might obtain access to to be locked down and verify that an adult is using it before going online.
That's going to be way more obtrusive than a well designed way to do anonymous age verification. It would affect nearly everyone who wants to go online, instead of only people who want to go online at sites that aren't safe for children.
> Children didn’t have access to the internet for thousands of years and they survived.
Adults also didn't have access to the internet for thousands of years and they survived, so what's your point?
> What happens if a child uses a computer at a friend's house to go online and something bad happens?
The guardians of the child should be held responsible.
When a child goes to a friends house their friends parents become the guardians. You as a parent decide trust that their friends parents are suitable for looking after your child.
It's the same as if you go in to the shop. Your relying on the shop keeper to keep the store responsible ensuring its not dangerous to yourself. As with the library, the library is responsible.
You walk in to my house, trip up on some turned up carpet who's fault is it? Your's technically because you should of seen the risk. However it is mine for having an potential hazard.
I should of informed yourself, btw the carpet is unsafe. The parents should of educated the child that the internet is unsafe and that such acts of this can occur online. This isn't 2005 when the internet was new, this was 2014 when internet was fully blown.
It could be more education that parents require however the parents are or at least should take blame. It was a website on the internet, their daughter was 11.
Parents should of known that on the internet malicious content exists: as do noodie magazines exist on the top shelf of the news agents.
This case plays out like the one of the parents of Maddie. They went out for a drink, left their three year old alone in a vila in another country but it's not our fault for going for drinks.
My children visit their friend's houses where I am sure there is beer in the fridge, guns (hopefully) in the gun safe, dangerous cleaning solvents in the garage, and perhaps other things I'm not even aware of. It is not insane to expect adults to manage the things in their houses and secure them appropriately when kids are present. And while there is certainly a possibility that some people may screw some of these things up from time to time even to deleterious result I'd still rather leave this responsibility in the hands of local adults than have to present ID to open my fridge.
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.
I had plenty of similarly unsavory experiences as a preteen with unfettered internet access, but never in my adulthood did I think I should go back and seek vengeance on the platforms. I chalked it up to my own youthful stupidly and moved on. This woman is a ghoul.
Well, she should probably have avoided letting insane political campaigners "counsel" her about how to feel about it or serve as her "support network". They are systematic exploiters who are in the business of turning non-traumatic experiences traumatic, turning traumatic experiences ultra-traumatic, and using people as political and media pawns. If you've already been manipulated, they're ready and willing to manipulate you some more.
Well done lady. Shooting the messenger is always the easiest. Good luck doing the same for plethora of alternatives as they won't give a damn about your sob story.
Going after a video chat application because it is unable to provide personalized human monitoring for every conversation, is insane.
Meanwhile no doubt a dozen competitors just got a boost in traffic.