For all its flaws, Tinder is at least intended for adults. Now a new dating/meet-up app, Yellow, is targeting teens as young as thirteen years old.
Yellow’s tagline is “Make new friends” but the app’s reviews suggest many users have much more than friendship on the brain.
The app format is exactly like Tinder– see a profile picture, name, age, and country, swipe right to connect, swipe left to ignore. If two people both swipe right on each others’ profiles, they are connected by Yellow and can chat privately.
The app claims to restrict users younger than thirteen years old and require parental consent for minors. The parental consent requirement is only a box to check– more easily ignored than not.
Setting up a Yellow account does require entering a birth date, but Yellow can’t tell a fake birthday from a real one. Some users list blatantly fake birthdays.
This guy is definitely not one year old.
But it would be just as easy for adult to create an account with a picture of a teen and list themselves as a teenager. These lax security standards allow anyone access to Yellow.
Even a real profile pictures wouldn’t clarify the user’s age particularly well either. There’s not much difference visually between an eighteen year old and a twenty-five year old. Some users forgo the picture altogether and use a screenshot of their Snapchat profile, opening themselves up for anyone on Yellow to contact them, with or without matching first.
Now anyone online can video chat with DavidG.
And, of course, users can easily upload a picture of someone else to complete a false profile. Who would be the wiser?
For a seventeen year old girl, Yellow suggests matching with individuals between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five years old. Tinder doesn’t allow users under the age of eighteen, so Yellow could appeal to teenagers, but what are all these adults doing on a teen app? Why aren’t the twenty-somethings chatting with adults on Tinder?
Too old for a teenager.
Which is a rather wide age range, especially for a minor.
Yellow doesn’t even require users to list their real names. This may protect kids’ personal information, but it also allows anonymity. And online, anonymity seems to equal trouble.
He could be a nice Harry Potter fan, but who knows?
In short, Yellow:
*Encourages underage kids to communicate privately with strangers
*Provides the perfect environment for sexting
*Pairs teens up with adults
*Encourages kids to add Yellow contacts to their other social media profiles
*Requires no parental consent
*Provides no verification that the user is who they say they are.
With red flag after red flag, Yellow is worth missing out on for your teens. Kids don’t need to make friends online– they can do that elsewhere. Parents– put this app on your family blacklist!
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