Chatroulette: Is new teenage website the most disturbing internet craze yet?

Chatroulette: Is new teenage website the most disturbing internet craze yet?
By Olivia Lichtenstein
Last updated at 9:14 AM on 26th April 2010

When writer OLIVIA LICHTENSTEIN's daughter told her about a 'cool' new teen website, she decided to investigate. What she found was the most worrying internet craze to date.
Late on a weekday afternoon and I'm sitting at my computer. On the screen in front of me are two small boxes - little video streams - one above the other. My face is in the bottom box. The face and bare torso of a man is in the one on top. Let's call him Gerry.
Beside Gerry's face is a box into which we can type, so that we can chat to one another. So he types hello and then asks where I come from. I say hello back and tell him I am from London.
Our exchange has lasted barely seconds, but suddenly another message pops up. He's asking me if I will remove my top so he can see my breasts.

He is a complete stranger, and one of the many crude and deviant men I have encountered in the past 30 minutes.
I quickly click a button to have him removed from my screen.



This, ladies and gentlemen, is the world of Chatroulette - an internet site that is turning into something of a phenomenon.
It was my 16-year- old daughter who told me about Chatroulette, a 'cool' new site she and her friends recently started using.

It's the fast-growing, latest fad among teenagers - a quick and easy way to communicate online with people from all over the world.

It works literally like roulette. Users log on, press a big button labelled 'Next' and it then randomly connects you to any one of a number of people across the world currently logged on. The gimmick is the fact that all of the users have webcams - so they can 'meet' the random strangers.
It was the idea of 17-year-old Russian schoolboy Andrey Ternovskiy. He launched it in November last year and his business quickly grew virally from 50 users to 50,000 in its first month.
One million people now visit it each day. However, what may have started as the innocent game of a Moscow schoolboy has quickly become a potential tailor-made portal for perverts and paedophiles - proving once again that the internet is putting the lives of our vulnerable teenagers in jeopardy.

And believe me, after you've seen it, you'll never complain about your teen's obsession with texting their friends again.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1268745/Chatroulette-Is-new-teenage-website-disturbing-internet-craze-yet.html

I read something about this a few weeks ago, I'm glad you posted this pi-girl. It is quite disturbing.

Oh no! Teens may think it is a cool site, but it is also one more place where creepy perverts can get their jollies.

It's beyond disgusting....