Chat, Social Media
Is Peekaboo Safe? A Peekaboo Review for Parents
Recommended Age
17 and up
Overview
While the CEOs of major social media apps like Snapchat and Meta are put on the stand for their (lack of) child safety features, there are tons of smaller social apps attracting teens to their platforms with even less regard for protection. One of the latest of these apps is Peekaboo, a friend-making app that launched just last year in August 2023.
It’s unclear just how popular Peekaboo is, so there’s a good chance your child hasn’t even heard of it and won’t before the hype dies down. And if you Google this app, you probably won’t find much since it’s so new.
From our testing of the app, here’s the TL;DR: This app is an unsupervised landmine of inappropriate content and potential encounters with predators. If you’re wondering if it’s safe for kids, the short answer is that it’s not.
Before we get into why this app is so unsafe, let’s take a quick look at what a user can expect from Peekaboo. It takes the same format as most dating apps but it’s not technically a dating app, it’s for “making friends.” It’s very similar to the Wizz app if you’re familiar. You can swipe through profiles and decide whether or not to start a chat with them. And that’s about it in terms of elements of the app — profiles and chats. But let’s not mistake simplicity for safety. In fact, apps where the only thing to do is chat with strangers are exactly what makes them dangerous.
Harmful Content 😲
We probably don’t have to lay out exactly what harmful content your child could face on an app that matches them with strangers from all over the world. We found that users will include all kinds of pictures on their profiles, such as sexually provocative images, images of smoking, drinking, or vaping, and much more. And this is just what people put on their public profiles — once in a private chat, the possibility for harmful content is near infinite.
It’s worth noting that Peekaboo’s website does claim to have “world-class moderation and a 24/7 safety team.” However, you don’t have to be on the app very long to see that content not meant for kids still finds its way on profiles and in chats. Additionally, teens are constantly picking up what’s known as “algo-speak” — slang specifically intended to evade AI filters that are commonly used to catch content that goes against an app’s community guidelines, like using “seggs” instead of “sex.”
Predation 🚨
The likelihood of predators being on Peekaboo and targeting kids is very high. Since Peekaboo is available for ages 13+, any user can be matched with any other user — regardless of age. But this is a fairly moot point, considering there’s no age verification. A predator could easily make an account pretending to be a minor and start talking to your child within minutes.
Peekaboo does have an option to “verify” your account by making sure your face matches the pictures you’re uploading to your profile. This could reduce the number of predators pretending to be a child, but it’s likely very easy to trick this or just simply not verify the account because again — it’s optional.
Positive Value 💙
We won’t sugarcoat it — the positive value for kids on Peekaboo is essentially nonexistent. While a “friend-making” app sounds wholesome, that’s not generally what brings most users to this app.
Privacy 🔒
There’s no such thing as a private profile here. Once you make a profile, you’re visible to any Peekaboo user. The location feature is another disturbing aspect of Peekaboo. Each profile includes the state the user is in and there is no setting to hide this. Even if it isn’t an exact location, for any “bad actor,” it would only take some clever persuasion to get a child to reveal their school, neighborhood, or even full address.
Parental Controls ✅
Peekaboo has no parental controls. To say the least, this is a huge oversight for any social app that is available for kids. But Bark puts some control back in your hands with our web filtering controls! With Bark, you can:
- Block Peekaboo entirely, if needed.
- Manage when your child can use Peekaboo throughout the day.
So, should my kid download it?
As we said from the beginning, we definitely do not recommend this app for kids. With endless potential for exposure to inappropriate content and/or predators (and virtually no benefits for kids), it’s probably best for kids to stay off Peekaboo.
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