> Omegle, as one of the last places that didn't tie your activity to a real identity, inherently limited the possible harm.
I'm not sure about that, hasn't omegle been using p2p all this time? People can easily see the other person's IP, and even be doxed. A site that doesn't even attempt to preserve this basic private data can't be considered anonymous IMO
IP alone makes it fairly tricky for non-state actors to identify someone, just roughly geolocate them. Good for freaking out people that don't know how the web works, but not useful for much more.
The flip side is that p2p means that nobody is snooping in on those video conversations. Omegle couldn't spy on it's users once they had entered a video chat. It was also fairly easy to see how they implemented the monitoring they did if you have a webdev background: periodically in between chats the omegle client requested an image from your cam.
I believe the whole video chat component, while initially using flash, was ultimately implemented using WebRTC, which is pretty cool and as shame more places don't make use of this.
I'm not sure about that, hasn't omegle been using p2p all this time? People can easily see the other person's IP, and even be doxed. A site that doesn't even attempt to preserve this basic private data can't be considered anonymous IMO