Internet Safety

INTERNET SAFETY:

YELLOW, OMEGLE AND OTHER DANGEROUS SITES  

                   

WHAT ARE SITES LIKE THESE CREATED OR INTENDED TO DO?

Both Yellow and Omegle are intended to help people find new friends, but tend to be misused. Omegle was started on March 25th 2009. Omegle was created to allow people to talk anonymously online, either video chat or just text chatting, without having to register or sign up. After being up for less than a month, Omegle was generating around 150,000 page views a day. This is a hugely successful site, but we think it's for the wrong reason. 

Yellow, deemed as 'Tinder For Teens' was the biggest 2 month phase of 2016. Yellow was another site that was intended to be for 'making friends' and chatting with random strangers in your desired field of interest. Parents knew about the nude photos their children were sending other people, and tried to get the app discontinued, but failed.

• WHAT MAKES THESE SITES SO DANGEROUS?

Social media platforms like Omegle and Yellow are often looked at as being dangerous because there are so many strangers who could find and use personal information very easily. It is very common for cat fishers to use sites/apps like these. It is easy to fake your identity and many people fall for it. Users of these sites could also very often be put in situations where they are either in danger or they feel uncomfortable. There have been many occasions in which users have been asked to either send pictures of themselves or remove items of clothing whilst they are talking through a webcam (Omegle) 

In one case a former police officer set up a fake Yellow account after receiving complaints from worried parents. According to the officer (Lisa McCrindle) the first conversation she had with someone they immediately asked her to send nude photos. “It was straight into the sexual stuff – send us a nude picture, here’s a dick pic”. 

We went on Omegle and saw for ourselves what Omegle’s environment was like. The main user was teenage boys and grown men. We saw numerous amounts of body parts and were very disgusted to realise that children our age have access to these types of sites. We also went on to experience Yellow, and experienced an astonishing amount of requests for inappropriate pictures. It is obvious to see that these sites are not being correctly used and should have more security and privacy settings to keep people our age safe.

• SURVEYS AND RESULTS

We decided to create a survey to see how many people our age have used Yellow or Omegle and what their experiences online were like. In the survey, we questioned if people had heard of the apps, what they used them for, what their opinions were etc.

WHAT CAN WE DO TO STAY SAFE ONLINE?

There are things we can and should do to stay safe on these. On Omegle, we can keep ourselves safe by not adding the people we meet on other social media sites. Also, we can stop talking to them if things start getting inappropriate. If you really want to stay safe, but still use it, the text chat is probably a better option. Although, there are a lot of bots on the text chat so keep that in mind. 

On Yellow, something we can do is to not release private information such as your city or phone number. If you plan on talking to someone, make sure they at least look real. If somebody asks you something personal, you can choose not to answer or remove them as a friend.