I watched as one user typed “Do you treat your parents with deference?” and another user carefully enunciated the sentence into his microphone, presumably from thousands of miles away. There were rooms to discuss the music of the 1980s and to flirt, of course, but one of the more interesting applications of this technology came in a room where non-native speakers could practice their English. These rooms had the ugly interface of classic AOL chatrooms, and the same confusion, with additional video thumbnails of the participants. I got the homepage to load again, after struggling mightily, then blundered my way to a different list of chat rooms that seemed more text-based, if still augmented by video and audio PalTalk’s point of pride is in blending these three elements. Then the whole site seemed to crash, though I noticed the ads-“1 Tip of a Flat Belly”-were still flashing.
Some had a “best friends” or “nightclub” theme, and one was called “Indonesia Free Parking.” The latter didn’t load at all, so I tried to join a room titled “The Hole,” which seemed to promise highly sexualized content. PalTalk had rounded up a matrix of “Popular Free Chat Rooms” I might enjoy what I had signed up for was PalTalk Express, which is bereft of the more advanced features mentioned below.Įach room appeared with a user-generated star rating of one to five, along with an up-to-date headcount. I clicked over to find that currently, 4,388 chat rooms were open. The profile page encouraged me to check out PalTalk’s chat groups, as I wasn’t yet a member of any. On Saturday afternoon I registered with the username “millionbear” and quickly found that my profile could go into some detail, if I liked: there were fields for sexual orientation, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and finally what I was “seeking.” Options ranged from “Friendship/Pals” to “Love & Romance” to plain old “Intimacy.” Hardly a groundbreaking proposition, and certainly not much to look at, as I found out. Just what is PalTalk, and why are intelligence agencies listening in on it? Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” Eight of these brands are (in)famous. There was something amiss about the National Security Administration’s description of their tactics and targets in scanning Internet data, as related by the Washington Post: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. This article originally appeared on The Daily Dot.
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