Hampshire Safeguarding Children Partnership (HSCP) are sharing a safeguarding alert following a recent press report about the dangers of the social networking website Omegle. 
  
Omegle is a free social networking website in which users are connected with other unknown users at random in order to chat via video, text or audio. This is known as a ‘virtual chatroom’. Omegle can be used for text and video chat. The concern with video chat is the user’s exposure to harmful or sexual content, as well as the young person’s ability to share their own sexual behaviour online. As with any webcam based platform, there is always a possibility that footage can be recorded, and possibly distributed, with or without the user’s knowledge. 
  
Advice on being safe online can be found on the HSCP website.