If you log onto the webcam site Chatroulette.com, you might see an impromptu comedy performance, a celebrity, or a naked man sitting in front of a webcam. Brad Stone of the New York Times wrote an article on Chatroulette that said about 10 percent of the videos on the site are from naked males in front of webcams.
Chatroulette randomly links strangers together to interact with each other – like the name implies, it drops you into conversation after conversation with strangers as you click through using a “Next” button.
The Chatroulette site was created by a 17 year old in Moscow, who recently came forward as Andrey Ternovskiy, a high school student. Chatroulette's numbers show alarming growth: it started out with less than 500 visitors in December, grew to 10,000 by the end of January 2010, and is currently up to 20,000 or so per night.
Besides containing sexually explicit content that's not appropriate for your child, another danger of Chatroulette is that your computer's webcam can easily be activated. A child's live video could be streaming across thousands of Chatroulette users' screens, enabling them to not only see your child but to save images to their computer, interact with them via instant messaging and microphone chat.
Read Kidproof's article on webcam safety.
