Global News

Thursday September 30, 2010

For those who don't know Chatroulette is a webcam chatting website where two users are randomly connected to each other for a chat session. The website in theory would allow uses to chat with a bunch of random people they may never choose to chat to, but since it's all random you can't decide who you chat to. You can choose to next the person though and you will be randomly connected to a new users.

It sounds good in theory, but randomly connecting people turned out to have a negative twist. "I believe that Chatroulette was great in the first honeymoon days after it was launched, before it was discovered by a strange people, who started to abuse the true freedom and democratic nature of the service," said Andrey Ternovskiy owner of Chatroulette. When people went to the site looking to chat with other users they were usually greeted with much more then that. At one point users estimated that 1 out of every 5 users where showing a little too much skin for a pg-13 website.

Andrey Ternovskiy was ultimately faced with a tough decision, let the nudity continue and risk the site being shut down or comply with U.S. laws and help the police capture these users. Andrey Ternovskiy has admitted that Chatroulette has been storing thousands of ip's, logs and even screenshots of these incidents.

With that being said, nothing has ever been done with this data. Andrey Ternovskiy has reported that if any law enforcement confronts him about the site he will willingly provide them with all the data they have gathered over the months.

No one knows if anything will ever come of the data or if it's even real. Some users say that it's just a bluff to try and scare the violators away. No one knows the truth, but would you be willing to risk it?