Don't Touch My Junk

Chatroulette: The Nice, The Strange and The Naked

At SUNY Purchase, everyone is talking about the recent craze known as chatroulette.com. Users beware - unless you want someone to ask you to show them your “junk”, stay away from this site.

The website was created three months ago by a seventeen year-old Russian, Andrey Ternovskiy, according to thenewyorktimes.com. When logging onto the website you will see a few tips and rules listed, emphasis on “few”. The website states that you must be 16 or older to use the website and that, “Chatroulette does not tolerate broadcasting obscene, offending, pornographic material and we will have to block users who violate these rules from using our service,” however, hardly anyone follows those rules. Within five minutes of entering the revolting chat room site, I saw over five penises within inches of my face, along with a few users who asked me to show some skin.

The only positive aspects of the site are that there is a “next” button to make the penises and other offenders disappear, a “report” button. Those are great features especially, when there is a picture that comes up on your screen of a half naked guy that says, “Hey will you show me your bra and I’ll show you what you want.”

Now, we all remember the 90’s when chat rooms on AOL were all the rage and we spent hours on them but, Chatroulette is taking the fad to a whole new level. Sophomore Samantha Kerzner, said that she has not used the website and that her friends who have saw mostly people who were masturbating on camera. On the flip side, she mentioned they were able to talk to a nice girl from France who they ended up Facebooking. Student Natalie Jeanmary, had harsher words to say, “I think it’s a very disturbing site, that’s all I think.” Jeanmary also said that she has guy friends who use Chatroulette purely to see “boobs.” More positive and light-hearted thoughts came from Jackie Powell who used the website with a bunch of her guy friends who convinced her to. “It’s not for me,” she said laughing, “It’s for anyone who doesn’t have anything better to do at one o’clock in the morning.”

Have we forgotten about Facebook, Myspace and Skype?! Granted, anyone these days can join one of those communication black holes but at least there are stricter privacy policies. Furthermore, when you are on Skype, you are only talking to people that you already know. Kerzner thinks that the idea is cool, “…but, I think it’s obviously been taken advantage of and not in the right way.” This is clearly the case with so many users. Blogs.wsj.com states that, “the Web Ecology Project Survey said that 135,000 users were on at once.”

If you think that dangers is on the upswing on the Internet now; think about what will exist when you have kids of your own?! “I would slap them upside the head…I don’t want any of my children to be on a site like that,” said Jeanmary in a serious tone. Sophomore Alyssa Cox, feels that, “It’s up to the parents [to monitor their children]; it’s not the Internet’s job to make sure that little kids aren’t looking at anything bad.” In other words, watch out because there are some scary things on the internet these days. Be safe especially because, “there is enough internet porn out there anyway,” commented Cox.