I feel really sorry that this happened but I am absolutely scared for the future because the next stop is babysitting apps that doesn't give a damn about users
Stalkerware is no joke. It's more ubiquitous than people realize and it can effectively ruin someone's life. Even when these tools are used for their intended purpose, I personally find their abilities borderline creepy when employed against kids beyond a certain age.
It's not just trafficking victims either. Abusive partners with a modicum of technical skills can make their victims' life hell through these apps. There are organizations and sites out there (https://stopstalkerware.org/) but they can't always help you if you're completely powerless.
Think about how this reflects on society when this becomes therapy for teenagers at the formative years in their life to deal with something very bad that happened to them by people who were supposed to protect them.
It doesn't feel unsafe. Apps like this are just people with a violence fetish getting off, not that having a lot of those in your country is particularly pleasant either.
I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. This is inevitable because it won’t be long before the likes of GPT-3 (and everything better) is an app you can run on your phone.
The solution isn’t to punish the one person you can catch because they admitted it but rather to evolve the platform/assumptions in a world where this is going to happen no matter what.
I don't think it will be the end because the vast majority of users will be completely unaware and/or indifferent to this - just what the parties behind it want them to be.
But you're right about the real bad actors, they already don't trust these platforms anyway.
That said, "grooming" in the broadest sense of the word happens on channels like Whatsapp, Instagram, even Pinterest for some reason because it's not blocked as social media by popular wifi filters.
Ex: girl (14) our son was friends with "had sex" with someone who claimed to be 18, but he recorded the interaction and used it to blackmail her to do more / other stuff. I don't know the details but that kinda thing happened via Whatsapp.
Murderers have used craigslist to find victims. Abusing an app in the manner which you describe (which I think somehow is incredibly unlikely to happen in reality), isn't necessarily a show stopper, as we have learned before.
>Finally, what happens when nefarious individuals realize it's super easy to pick up rich people's children by pretending to be a Boost driver?
This is where my company's app, Mooble, comes in.
Mooble is a breakthrough anti-molestation app built for modern, on the go kids. By simply pressing a button or speaking a programmable safety word, Mooble broadcasts an emergency alert through all of the child's linked social networks.
And... that right there would also be a very sufficient surveillance system. As much as I want this to be over, it's really scary hearing about a system where everyone's physical interactions with everyone else is intentionally logged and alerted upon. Even if this app was only really used for a couple months to get us past this hurdle, it'll both condition people to detailed contact tracing and will inevitably remain installed on many devices.
It's making it worse until something bad happens to someone you value.
If Obama's daughters (or Trump's if you are on the other side) were killed in some horrific racist incident, wouldn't you approve the usage of such software if it was the only hope of getting the perpetrator? Or would you say "as much as I am saddened, I cannot approve such massive invasion of privacy".
The majority of folks? I don't think so, an actual majority of people in the US won't be aware of this kind of stuff until some psycho stalks and kills someone and they find something like this on his phone.
I mean, it will happen sooner or later, same number of violent psychopaths out there as always. The media will love the cyber-stalker angle too, just like Columbine was used to push the Violent Video Games Ruin Children meme.
An app like this makes a better target for public outrage than facebook or another big player too, so they'll probably take the brunt of the 24 hour news cycle outrage. Especially since the big players have a prepared coordinated PR response ready to go already.
I see that you are blaming nextdoor, when nextdoor is just a symptom. The actual issue is that these people are paranoid and scared and marking anything as suspicous. If not for nextdoor, it will be some other app - but the issue will stay the same.
What's a bit silly is the idea that there's someone sitting at home wishing to perform a stalking or rape, but is prevented from doing so by the lack of an app for that.
So someone created another app that doesn't help women that have been harassed, and "empowers" women who haven't with a tool to harass innocent men? And somehow this is a good thing? I hope they get sued to the ground.
Not to absolve Facebook or instagram but it’s clear that the entire model of unrestricted access to global internet is ripe for abuse of vulnerable demographics. Also see scamming elderly with fake profiles of relatives claiming they’ve been kidnapped and so on.
I wouldn’t claim to know the solution. But our starting point is platforms built to provide strangers with unsupervised digital time spent with other strangers. One of those parties may be perverts and predators and the other may be children or teenagers.
You could destroy Facebook and instagram and I guarantee this moves to Snapchat, to TikTok, or to whatever other platforms fill the void.
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