I think the generated avatar only serves as a 'honeypot', so to speak. A colleague of mine provided me with some interesting information in a discussion quite a while ago: His company a few years back provided text-only chatrooms for their customers. Being an ISP, and the fact that they also marketed it, led to quite a huge audience (also, the Internet 'rush' began).
'Predators', though not yet known under this moniker, became a problem quite soon. So what did they do? They set up automated bots, which had just enough logic to fool a human into thinking it's speaking to it's own kind. If someone engaged them in a conversation, and IIRC, asked for some sensitive information (though I'm not sure of the latter), they generated an alert and a real, human police officer took over the bot.
But either an avatar or other human being - I'm still not sure about the legality of the whole thing; a long time ago I learned something along the lines that law enforcement is not allowed to 'bait' someone into doing something illegal; as the whole situation could be doctored to force somebody to do something they wouldn't have done otherwise. I think it's related to your question; but unfortunately I can't recall what the concept is called, or if I'm completely off-track here anyway.
Though in the end; the person still did something illegal, and I can't think of this line of reasoning to work well in court.
"I'm still not sure about the legality of the whole thing; a long time ago I learned something along the lines that law enforcement is not allowed to 'bait' someone into doing something illegal; as the whole situation could be doctored to force somebody to do something they wouldn't have done otherwise. I think it's related to your question; but unfortunately I can't recall what the concept is called, or if I'm completely off-track here anyway."
'Predators', though not yet known under this moniker, became a problem quite soon. So what did they do? They set up automated bots, which had just enough logic to fool a human into thinking it's speaking to it's own kind. If someone engaged them in a conversation, and IIRC, asked for some sensitive information (though I'm not sure of the latter), they generated an alert and a real, human police officer took over the bot.
But either an avatar or other human being - I'm still not sure about the legality of the whole thing; a long time ago I learned something along the lines that law enforcement is not allowed to 'bait' someone into doing something illegal; as the whole situation could be doctored to force somebody to do something they wouldn't have done otherwise. I think it's related to your question; but unfortunately I can't recall what the concept is called, or if I'm completely off-track here anyway.
Though in the end; the person still did something illegal, and I can't think of this line of reasoning to work well in court.