Yubo, the social media app formerly known as Yellow, was founded in Paris by three university friends and launched in 2015. The app’s meteoric growth saw users harness the app in ways its developers had never intended and led to it being dubbed ‘Tinder for Teens’, on account of the sharing of explicit imagery and the app’s use of a swiping feature synonymous with Tinder.

Therefore, in late 2017, Yubo and its developers began a drive to improve the safety of its service and in the process rid itself of its unfortunate reputation.

Why Are You Now Publicising The Safety-Conscious Changes You Have Made To Yubo?

For the sake of transparency. In its infancy, Yubo experienced exponential growth in user numbers which brought about issues that as a small team we were unable to respond as quickly as we’d have liked. In the light of this, media outlets and digital safety advocates were quick to criticize the app and the behaviour that it was then facilitating.

Our goal now is to make everyone aware of the safeguards we have put in place and also to promote the benefits of live-streaming.

One of the major changes has been the creation of two separate communities on the app, one for those aged 13-17 and another for those over 18. What safeguards are in place to keep these separate?

Currently, we use an age-gate to keep these communities separate. Though we know that this is not fool-proof, we do have to rely on users’ honesty.

If users do lie about their age and then go on to act in a way that may be criminal or inappropriate, we have several different ways of unearthing and then blocking them.

The exact techniques we use must remain a secret otherwise users would quickly learn to bypass them.

Young People Who Use Yubo Must Confirm They Have Parental Consent Before Doing. How Do You Ensure They Have This?

The EU’s new GDPR regulations demand that we obtain parental consent. However, there is currently no technical solution to ensure that we have this on all user sign-ups. Even Facebook uses email verification to ascertain parental consent, though the flaws of this method are widely known.

With Over 15 Million Users Around The World, How Do You Ensure That All The Content That Passes Through Your App Is Appropriately Monitored?

We have moderation teams working worldwide 24/7. We also use algorithms to monitor activity on the app and if something inappropriate is detected, it will automatically be removed, or the offending stream shut down.

Conclusion

Yubo’s mission is to create a safe space for teenagers and young adults to socialize and share content in a safe, responsible way. It was founded in 2015, and has over 20 million users. Since adopting the technology in December 2018, Yubo has conducted over five million age checks using YAS. YAS can estimate age within 2 seconds and the service can handle over 1M checks per day.