Answer Guy Central

Welcome back to Chatroulette. We hope you enjoy exposing yourself to strangers across the world one at a time. But we’re going to help police arrest you, because that works for us.

Actually, I like this.

Ever since I mentioned Chatroulette a few months back, my words on how ridiculous Chatroulette is have been a big draw here; we get traffic every day to this post about Chatroulette,  and I suspect the reason is that we were the first to point out the issues with geocoding pictures of naked masturbating people.

Vist Chatroulette.com now and you see this ominous warning:

Welcome to our site. Enjoy your time here.

Warning: Broadcasting inappropriate content to minors is a violation of both US and UN law.
We are actively cooperating with law enforcement agencies.

Yeah, that’s right. It might not have occurred to you when you dropped your pants for all the world to see, but “all the world” includes minors. And exposing yourself to minors is illegal in many places.

Well, as NewTeeVee.com reports, Chatroulette is now cooperating with law enforcement officials who ask for help identifying naked people. And this isn’t a freedom of expression issue, it’s a “what the heck is happening on the Internet?” issue.

Or it’s about business. Chatroulette is a cool enough idea in a “social networking is what the Internet is really about and Chatroulette is a form of social networking” way, but there’s no good way for a small operation to police everything that happens on their site. So let’s let the police do our policing! It’s free, and we look like good guys!

What if your next business change included a way to let others make your change for you?

If the message that you need to be careful what you say and do on the Internet hasn’t sunk in just yet, get ready: pictures from Chatroulette have been captured, geo-coded, and are available for anyone to see at Chatroulettemap.

If you’ve missed it, Chatroulette is a new web site where you can go to instantly start chatting with random strangers across the Internet. It’s a cool enough idea, I suppose; why not make an occasional new friend this way?

Not surprisingly, there are reasons. The Chatroulette user community is thus far made up of mostly young, mostly male people who will instantly click away from you if you turn out to be anything other than a young, attractive female.  So Chatroulette doesn’t actually work. It might one day, and if he’s smart the young man who created Chatroulette will make a fortune selling his technology to dating sites. But right now it does nothing.

Oh, and there’s another reason not to play with Chatroulette: besides being comprised mostly of fickle young men, the other significant segment of the Chatroulette community is people masturbating on camera.

In fact, one totally anecdotal study of Chatroulette showed that one in seven of your new friends will be naked and touching himself. Watch this movie (don’t worry; there are no naughty pictures):

So now, we get Chatroulettemap. Their use of the data from Chatroulette makes what you do there public. REALLY public. I went to Chatroulettemap this morning, clicked down to  a street level view of midtown Manhattan, and found this:

At least these boys have their clothes on. But seriously; do you want your picture and a pretty-darned-accurate location of where you are out there on the Internet that way?

Still not sure how this Internet thing really works?  Let The Answer Guy help protect your privacy