Parents: Do You Know Who Your Children are Chatting With?

I spend a lot of time on the Internet researching popular sites and I notice a very disturbing trend:  parents have given their children free reign over the Internet.  It has been said that in the 60s and 70s, the television was used by busy parents as a babysitter.  Well, now in the 21^st century, the Internet has taken over that function.  The difference between the television and the Internet is that the television didn’t have the capability to try to lure children away from home.  Sure, there were interactive shows like Winky Dink, where a child could put a clear vinyl sheet over the television screen and connect the dots to draw the item that Winky needed to save the day, but Winky Dink never talked one on one to any child.  Not so with the Internet.  This leads to the question, “Parents: Do you know who your children are chatting with on-line?”  

With children getting their own computers and laptops at younger and younger ages, there should be rules set and followed for the use of this equipment.  The main rule should be that no child under the age of 16 should have a web-cam/Internet equipped computer in his or her room.  I find it unbelievable that parents who will not allow their young children to walk to school alone will allow them to wander freely around the Internet.  One of the sites that tweens and young teens seem to be latching on to is Omegle.  Parents, beware!

Omegle is an unmonitored site that was started on March 25, 2009 by then 18 year old Leif K-Brooks.  Within a month of the start date, Omegle had in excess of 150,000 users each month.  The site was set up to be an anonymous chat site where strangers who would never otherwise have an opportunity to meet, could chat on-line.  The site is open to anyone without the need to register and there is no cost for its use.   Sure, there is a disclaimer that a user must be 18 years old to chat, but, as we all know, anyone can be any age they want to be on the Internet. 

In the beginning, the site was text chat only.  Now, it offers both text and video chat.  Kids and chatting with strangers via text is a nightmare in itself, but when you add video to the mix, results can be disastrous.  A very public instance of the dangers of video chatting with strangers is the story of Amanda Todd, a Canadian teenager who committed suicide in October 2012.  When Amanda was 13 years old, she discovered video chat and loved that males of all ages would comment about her beauty.  During one of her chats, a male told her that she was gorgeous and wanted to see more of her.  He convinced her to show her breasts on camera.  This person took a screenshot of the video and spread it all over the Internet. 

This person found Amanda on Facebook and friended her claiming to be someone who would be starting in her school the following semester.  Once he had access to her Facebook page, he had name and location of her school, and he friended all of her friends.  It wasn’t long before the topless pictures of Amanda were showing up on the school website and her friends’ pages.  Changing schools didn’t help because even with the move, this person found her and did the same thing with her new friends and her new school.  Finally, after years of torment, Amanda Todd made a YouTube video telling her story on flashcards and on October 10, 2012, she was found hanged in her home.  To this day, even though there has been speculation, no one knows who Amanda’s tormentor was.

So many things can go wrong when a child is allowed to do whatever they want on the Internet.  As the above example shows, children are naive and will sometimes do things they know is “wrong” thinking that there is no harm in it.  Another concern is for your privacy.  Omegle is supposed to allow people to chat anonymously, but there are instances where the chat leads to the exchange of names, locations and phone numbers.  Even without a location, a phone number can tell a lot about a person…like their close location.  If a phone number of 305-555-5555 is given, it’s easy to figure out that the owner of that phone lives in south Florida.  Combine that with a name and your exact location can be found.   

Another such chat site is Chatroulette.  This site was created by 17 year old Andrey Ternovsky who lives in Moscow, Russia.  The concept is that you sign on and are linked to a random stranger from anywhere in the world.  You never know who you are going to get and any time during the chat, either party may disconnect and each will be connected to another random stranger.   Andrey says he got the idea from watching The Deer Hunter where prisoners of war in the Vietnam era were forced to play Russian Roulette.  The difference between Chatroulette and Omegle is that Chatroulette requires the user to register, but registration is free.

An unofficial study of this site showed that just about half of the time, people are connecting to someone in the United States.  Of all the connections, 89% are male, 11% are female and many showed no one on camera.  It was also found that every 1 in 8 of these random connections shows someone who is naked or performing some sex act (usually masturbation) in front of the camera.  Is this something you want your child exposed (no pun intended) to?

Both Omegle and Chatroulette ask you to allow the sites to access your webcam in order to connect you with these strangers.  Now, imagine what can happen if the webcam in your child’s room is accessed by either of these sites.  

Certainly, there were some criticisms of these sites.  One came from American psychiatrist and best-selling author, Dr. Keith Ablow has said of Chatroulette, “Parents should keep all their children off the site because it’s much too dangerous for children.  It’s a predator’s paradise.  This is one of the worst faces of the Internet that I’ve seen.  It’s disconnecting human relationships rather than connecting them.”

President of the National Center of Missing & Exploited Children, Ernie Allen said on CBS’s The Early Show that it is “the last place parents want their kids to be.  This is a huge red flag; this is extreme social networking.  This is a place kids are going to gravitate to.”

The founder of Chatroulette has told the New York Times that “Everyone finds his own way of using the site.  Some think it is a game, others think it is a whole unknown world, others think it is a dating service.  I think it’s cool that such a concept can be useful for so many people.”  He admits that some people are using the site in ways that he doesn’t agree with, like masturbating on camera or even just standing around naked.  There are reports that show that many users of Chatroulette are alarmingly young males, but there is a good portion of alarmingly young females too.

Whether it’s Omegle or Chatroulette, parents need to be aware that these sites do exist and are being found by their kids.  This should be a lesson to all parents to closely monitor what their kids are doing on-line; they may not be as innocent as you would like to believe.  Get the computer out of your child’s room so you can see exactly what they are doing.  It would be best if you put a password on the computer so that your children can’t access it at night after you’ve gone to bed.  Your privacy and your children’s innocence need to be saved.

At the top of this page, there is a free Privacy Guide.  Please take a few minutes to download it so you could discover more ways for you and your family to stay safe on the Internet and off.