‘Tinder for teens’ fear App lets kids video-chat strangers
CHILDREN as young as 10 are using a dating app dubbed “Tinder for teens” that lets users send nude photos and “rate” each other over live-stream video.
Yubo – formerly called Yellow – ranked in the top five most downloaded apps for teens and pre-teens, a Family Zone Cyber Safety survey revealed, and it has more than one million users per month in Australia.
The app, launched early last year, is similar to the dating app Tinder in that youngsters swipe to match with each other. It also syncs with popular instant messaging app Snapchat.
However, a feature that lets youngsters live-stream themselves to anyone watching on the app has appalled child health experts and led to growing fears that it could be a playground for paedophiles.
Child psychologist Jordan Foster said some of her clients had met sexual predators in person after being lured under false pretences on Yubo, which can pinpoint where a user lives.
“I’ve seen a number of boys, most of them around 16 or 17, who have met with predators thinking they were an attractive young girl,” Ms Foster said.
In other disturbing incidents, she said insecure teenage girls were pressured into sending nude photos that were then distributed around their school community or posted online in what she described as a “form of grooming”.
Teens sick of receiving crude pictures from users have been forced to spell out “no nudes” in an attempt to keep away the creeps.
Other Yubo users post photos of themselves smoking drugs in their profile pictures.
It is one of several apps, including Live.ly, Meetme and Sarahah, that have sparked online safety fears.
Australia’s leading cyber safety expert, Susan Mclean, said there were “parental control issues” when it came to ensuring children were properly protected online.
“What the hell are little kids doing in the iTunes store to download things anyway?” Ms Mclean said.
Family Zone’s cyber safety expert Peter Brown said 45 per cent of pre-teens were using unsafe social media while some teens spent an astounding 10 hours online a day during school holidays.
A spokeswoman for Yubo said the company was investigating technologies to ensure users were truthful about their identity.
“We do not tolerate any abuse of our site and we will delete any users under the age of 13,” she said.