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Chat-rooms go wireless - paedophile nightmares will haunt market

Australian WAP success may bring all the terror stories of chatrooms to the realm of phone texting, as Jumbuck signs up MMo2 and AOL for its live wireless chat services. This could be a big boost for mobile phone camera sales.

The software allows phone users to link into normal online chatroom services. It has been tested by several phone operators, not just in the UK. Sprint PCS has trialled Jumbuck in the US, and Telstra in Australia has used the service too. And it is reported to be the biggest single traffic-generator on WAP portals.

In the Far East, Digifone and StarHub are already customers, says Jumbuck.

So far, no voices of protest have been heard, but it must be just a matter of time before tabloid headlines start appearing.

Vigilantes have been calling for the virtual banning of chat room software by online portals like Yahoo and AOL, because it is perceived as a danger to children, after the abduction of kids in their early teens and pre-teens by paedophiles who posed as younger men online.

One of the biggest scare stories has been the prospect of kids being able to access these chatrooms via their phones. Not only does this raise the prospect of the children actually chatting to people while away from supervision by their families, but it also makes it theoretically possible for location-based software to reveal where they are.

In Switzerland, this is possible already. A rival service from Valis offers a date-line service. It allows mobile users - including kids - to set up meetings with people who are near them, and is able to say where the target is within 500 metres.

Valis - like Jumbuck - runs its own software but unlike Jumbuck, which runs the service on its own servers, Valis licenses the software to the mobile phone operator.

Children are seen as perticularly vulnerable to predators, because parental supervision of homework is not usually intensive, and so very young kids can start chatting to anonymous strangers while their family believes they're hard at work with chores. They are allowed to "meet" people online in a way that would never be permitted if they said they were going to a pub to meet strangers.

It's quite possible that dating services like this could lead to a boost in sales for camera-attachments for mobile phones, so that prospective partners can be scanned. Parents are likely to recommend this as a precaution before meeting strangers, once they are aware of the potential.