Slashdot Mirror
Snapchat Sued For Facilitating 107 MPH Car Crash (patch.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A Georgia couple is suing Snapchat, a popular instant messaging and photo sharing app, after a car accident last year seriously injured the husband, leaving him permanently brain damaged. According to media reports, Wentworth Maynard, the victim, was driving in a 55-mile-per-hour zone when 18-year-old Christal McGee crashed into him traveling at 107 miles per hour. McGee, according to lawsuits, was attempting to use Snapchat's "speed filter" -- a feature that overlays the speed one is traveling on a picture. "Snapchat's speed filter facilitated McGee's excessive speeding," reads the lawsuit. "McGee was motivated to drive at an excessive speed in order to obtain recognition through Snapchat by the means of a Snapchat 'trophy.'"
But not fast enough for first post!
It does make you wonder what Snapchat was thinking with this feature. Did nobody anticipate that jerks would drive crazy speeds because of this thing?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Why limit it to just millennials? A 50 year old person texting behind the wheel is just as dangerous as a 16 year old texting behind the wheel, and you're lying through your teeth if you tell me you haven't seen idiots of all ages glued to their phones instead of the road while driving. Focusing in on stereotyping one generational group instead of actually trying to address the problem generally fails to get anything of merit accomplished.
Yet another case of holding people who have absolutely NOTHING to do with this situation asking to be held responsible for the actions of another. Why don't we hold the person responsible for this... responsible? And before you say "Why does snapchat even have this filter?". Ever heard of passengers? It's the same reason why locking out the phone while driving doesn't work (n-1) people in a vehicle/boat. I for one don't want a stupid world where people not responsible for a situation are responsible.
There is no evidence that Snapchat has a "speed" trophy. There is a site that tracks them.
1. On a train.
2. On a bus.
3. On an aircraft.
4. As a passenger in a car.
It's time for people to start taking responsibility for their own actions. Reasoning like yours is fucking retarded beyond all reason or logic. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what he was doing was dangerous.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Neither the kid nor the kid's family have deep pockets. So the couple is suing Snapchat because it has deep pockets. Of course, the attorneys will milk every dime.
Before we jump to the assumption that this family went out of their way to file a lawsuit against snapchat because "georgia reasons" lets remember that after an accident, attorneys will market directly to you. Any cut-rate lawyer in the state has probably shilled all parties for relevant interest in a lawsuit. An attorney, however misplaced, has identified a willing party to file a lawsuit against a popular corporation and sadly failed to realize that snapchat has no identifiable revenue stream. Sure, you'll probably enter the courtroom confident in a win..but outside of publicity for winning a suit against a popular online service your billable hours have likely easily usurped Snapchats own guestimate of a one-time 3 million dollar revenue generation.
the real pisser is that in the event snapchat puts up a fight over your definition of "facilitate" (which isnt the strongest here) you risk dragging real victims into court which they may not be prepared for. since you havent specified damages, its likely youre waiting for a settlement based on your "facilitate" defense, but be prepared for the possibility the parties give up, or the judge decides theres a reasonable cap on what you can bleed from a company that...again...doesnt make money.
Good people go to bed earlier.
any feature that risks
http://www.mofo.com/people/a/a...
being on the other side of the table in a lawsuit
SHOULD NOT BE CREATED
i think at MoFo the interns make more money than most of us here
By assigning a "Trophy" for traveling a certain speed, they are creating an addicting experience
I crave Slashdot mod points. I get an endorphin rush every time one of my insightful posts (like this one) goes to +5. Sometimes I post while driving. If I crash, should I be able to sue Slashdot? Should I be able to sue the people that mod me down, thus requiring me to make even more posts to get high?
the problem with this is that people commonly use their phones as a GPS.
Because they can get more money in damages from a tech company than they can from some idiot Georgia teen and her family. If the kid who crashed into them were a multi-millionaire, Snapchat's involvement would have never even been a talking point. They are making a fringe case of negligence that will be difficult to prove, simply because it's the option that offers the possibility of highest financial gain.
Would you hold Snapcat liable if they recorded the surrounding temperature and someone tried to maximize it by sitting in an enclosed car in the hot sun and died? All Snapchat did was to record a readily available piece of GPS data. It is the fault of the driver that she tried to maximize it. Snapchat does not have a "speed trophy". They even show a warning not to use Snapchat while driving.
I've had two narrowly avoided head-ons with texters holding their phones across the top of their steering wheels, and neither of them were millenials.
They were people roughly my age -- and my first video game system was Pong.
Putting "using Snapchat" (or any other distraction) aside, I've heard of people seeing how fast their cars would go before. Back in college, a close friend of mine went 100mph on a straight, deserted road just to see what it was like. Even then, I told him that was idiotic. I've done 80mph on highways before and I could feel my control of the car slipping. At 85mph, I'd be much more prone to an accident. I couldn't even conceive of doing 100mph. I'm sure there might be some who could do 100mph safely, but this is a minority. Unfortunately, there are a lot more people who think they can do 100mph safely but can't.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Excuse me, what he was doing? He's the one who got ran into!
It's time for people to start taking responsibility for their own actions.
Unless their actions involve encouraging dangerous behavior, in which case you seem to think they deserve a free pass.
But that achievement doesn't exist, so how is it snapchats fault?
This thinking is disgusting. No. You are responsible for your actions. Anything can be incentive.
Example:
I think your idea is stupid and that is incentive for me to slap you. Therefore you are responsible (or partly responsible) for the slap.
Or (a less funny more real life expample)
Someone finds a girl to be pretty. She's obviously "asking for it." Therefore she asked to be raped.
No. "Incentive" is not an excuse. People are responsible for their actions,
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
It's not that the victim's mother (the plaintiff) doesn't want to hold the other driver responsible; it's that Snapchat has a shitload more money to go after, so if she can get a jury to agree that they were complicit, she can recover damages (money) from them. Few rational people probably believe on the surface that Snapchat is responsible for the reckless behavior of its users, but lawyers in courtrooms can be very convincing. That's how they put food on their tables, and Mercedes in their garages.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Ok - so the users were morons, but there are plenty of completely legitimate ways to go 100MPH.
If they offered a trophy for snapping a picture of 10 Snickers bars and someone goes and steals them to achieve it, the company isn't at fault for "encouraging" theft - they would be offering a trophy for something achievable using completely legitimate and legal means, and the idiotic user decided to do something illegal as a shortcut.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Let's sue all car manufactures if their velocimeter range is above the current circulation max speed because, obviously, they're inactivating people to break the law.
> I think your idea is stupid and that is incentive for me to slap you. Therefore you are responsible (or partly responsible) for the slap.
There's a well-established legal principle that the recipient of a slap can indeed incite the slap. For example, if I were to call your wife a nasty hoe, a fucking cunt, and you immediately punched me in the nose, most jurisdictions would recognize that I would indeed have some responsibility for what happened.
Whether or not you or I LIKE that principle is a different matter, but in fact calling your wife a disease-ridden whore would actually make a punch in the nose likely, and the law does recognise that.
How is this any different?
Snapchat isn't paying you, and their app says not to use it while driving. That's pretty much the complete opposite of your scenario. I agree that they'll probably share some culpability in the end, but having this dumb speed filter thing is absolutely not the same as telling someone to drive as fast as possible with reckless abandon. The latter is a feature built-in to most teenagers, phone/app/camera or not.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I wish Snapchat would offer an IQ overlay filter. If the highest one broke 90, I would be surprised.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Here is the link to the new trophies (the link is in the update of the article). "Speed" is still not there.
There are a few cases a year (one recent one was local to us) where a dummy uses Periscope to live-stream their drunk driving. Then they're shocked when the police thank them for providing vital evidence in their case. I read this Snapchat story a couple days ago - obviously it finally got far enough in the court system to be picked up publically because it's being reported everywhere now.
It seems to me that if Snapchat weren't a hip, cool Internet startup, something like a speed filter and/or trophy would have immediately been squashed by even the most clueless in-house legal team. In "real businesses" it's their job to ensure that products don't get released that can lead to lawsuits, or if they can, to minimize their impact. I can just see the discussion around a conference table in Snapchat's HQ about this awesome new feature that uses the GPS to tag a user's speed -- "Wouldn't that be epic? "Yeah, let's do it!" was probably the only consideration it was given.
Obviously, the idiot driver was at fault, but if you're an accident victim, you'll try to recover anything you can. Apparently the other driver in the crash is permanently disabled and has traumatic brain injury as a direct result. You can bet that the first thing that Christal's family did after the crash was to hide their assets and declare bankruptcy. Wentworth will wait for decades to get any sort of compensation from insurance companies, let alone punitive damages.
The whole thing reminds me of this Bloom County: http://www.gocomics.com/bloomc...
Chances are the whole lawsuit is predicated on the idea that the plaintiffs will get a lot more from Snapchat than they will from an 18 year old.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
If you pay someone $100 to punch someone else in the face, you've still committed a crime. Encouraging irresponsible behavior in others is irresponsible.
There is a huge difference between paying someone to do something which is clearly illegal and having a daft game where people can compete completely legally. If you believe snapchat is guilty then does that also make say a day care centre which charges exorbitant late pick up fees liable too because it encourages parents to speed so they get there in time? or would whoever delayed them be liable?
Going this route leads to madness. If a person chooses to avoid a legal way to complete some task and makes a conscious decision to choose an illegal route in order to get a better outcome then the responsibility for that decision must lie with them. Let's face it the only reason snapchat is getting sued here is because they have money. The person at fault here is the idiot driving at 107mph but they probably won't make much money of someone stupid enough to be doing that so they go after the person with the money no matter how unjustifiable it is.
wait... i get rear ended, by a car going 50 miles over the speed limit... i don't care what the fuck you're doing... you could be black out drunk and stopped and i'd still say it wasn't your fault.
One person pulls out in front of another, ILLEGALLY (the car sueing was ticketed for pulling out wrongly),
In addition, we have an 18 y.o driver (2 years of experience), WITH A FRIEND, driving over 100 MPH in a 55, while using a phone illegally, and the car goes after snapchat.
What our fascists does not destroy, lawyers will.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Unfortunately, the 18 year old very likely only had basic liability insurance that wouldn't cover 1/10th of this guy's current and future medical bills. Suing her would at most get you a court judgement she'll never be able to honor and she'll be back on the road soon enough once her suspension is up.
He was nearly killed because she wanted a "cool" picture to show her friends how badass she is... brain damage usually means part of him is dead and he'll never be the same. Snapchat offering an asinine feature that encourages people to be stupid makes them partially at fault. And they have the money to cover his medical bills which will likely be in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Along with the years of PT, psychological therapy and medications he'll need.
This guy is ruined for life and will probably never be able to work again. I don't blame them for going after SnapChat, it's likely the only way he'll be able to get medications and care after he leaves the hospital. The kid won't be able to pay for shit.
It only takes 2 seconds to travel the length of a football field while going 100mph. The car may not even have been in view when they started pulling out and then suddenly it smashed into them.
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
If fairly certain snapchat can delete entire trophies from their system.
Can someone explain to us folks who have already graduated high school why the world needs another messaging that is capable of sending photos and why the fuck does it needs trophies?
My generation pioneered social networks and frankly I'm disappointed that the only thing they've added to messaging apps in the last decade or so has been trophies.
The idea behind Snapchat is that after you send a photo, it disappears in a few moments. You can screencap it, but the sender gets an alert when you do that. So, it's like popular for sending dickpics and stuff.
So, because I made a minor typo, the entire message was lost on you? God damn you're a fucking idiot. Let me spell it out: Snapchat isn't forcing you or anyone else to make bad decisions. If you make a bad decision that's on you and nobody else.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Everything in the newspaper is true, except the things i know about.
Don't kid yourself. Same shit different day. My generation, or yours was no better, and no worse.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Well, maybe Snapchat creating a way to overlay your speed on a picture was a "bad decision". As in, what are people going to do ... oh yeah, that's right, they are going to see how FAST THEY CAN GO.
Too bad this Darwin award could have taken 5 other people with it.