NYT: Stickam Has Close Ties to Porn Sites

Here's some required reading for parents with social-networking teens. A former vice president of Stickam, a web site that allows registered members to participate in unfiltered live video chats via webcams, tells the New York Times that the site is owned by a Japanese businessman who also owns a vast network of pornographic sites using live webcams.

Stickam is a site that has had lots of parents concerned from the start for good reason. As the Times' Brad Stone writes, Stickam is small compared with MySpace and YouTube, but "...several thousand of its mostly teenage members log onto the site each night to broadcast their own lives, often from their bedrooms. They put on makeshift talk shows, flirt with other members in video chat rooms, and often, if they are female, field repeated requests to take off their clothes."

Alex Becker, the former vice president, tells the Times that Stickam and some of the porn sites run by the parent company, Advanced Video Communications, share employees and office space. The Los Angeles-based AVC plays down its pornographic network and instead often calls itself a video conferencing and e-commerce services provider to businesses in Japan and other Asian countries.

Check out the full article below, and Stone's blog for a follow-up on the reaction to the piece. Then tell your kids to stay away from Stickam.

LINK: Accuser Says Web Site Has X-Rated Link [New York Times]

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