Say it with me folks: “Omegle is not an app”

The other day I found a news article from a newspaper in the UK. It states that a UK police department has warned its residents about a new app called Omegle. I’ll give then an E for effort since more parents should know about Omegle, however, I feel like they’ve done themselves a disservice by referring to Omegle as an app.

For the uninitiated, Omegle is a website whose tagline is “Talk to strangers!” Omegle lets people engage in video chats with random people. There are no age checks on Omegle that are actually effective.

Omegle is not an app. There is nothing that needs to be installed on any internet-enabled device to use Omegle. There are no app icons to look for on your kid’s device. Omegle is used strictly in the device’s web browser. Instead, you would need to look in the web browser’s history to see if any of your kids are using Omegle. Omegle itself even says on the top of its website that…

You don’t need an app to use Omegle on your phone or tablet!

Omegle is hardly new either as it first went live in 2009.

Omegle is often used by online predators to groom children and exchange child porn. While Omegle says that the chats are monitored, that hasn’t stopped predators and child porn traders from using their website.