Is Amino Safe? An Amino App Review for Parents

Harmful Content 😲

Although Amino’s community guidelines ban content like hate speech, nudity, porn, spam, and violence, there are a ton of exceptions to each rule. For example, gore from a movie will not get flagged but real-life injuries could be. Each community has its own rules, too. In some, explicit sexual discussions are allowed when they otherwise wouldn’t be. 

A team of moderators at Amino review content that has been reported for review, and they also proactively scan for hateful content, dangerous activity, and pornography and remove it if found. 

But at the end of the day, Amino is an app that features tons of chat rooms with millions of strangers — so it’s basically the Wild West. Your kid can run into almost any and everything while on it.

Predation 🚨

As an app composed of nothing but chat rooms, Amino’s potential for predation is off the charts. The biggest concern would be adults posing as children to begin the grooming process — especially in kid-oriented communities.

Privacy 🔒

There are no real privacy controls on Amino. One proactive step you could take to help ensure privacy is to require your child to create an unidentifiable username (i.e., no real names, school mascots, or birth years) and to not use a real photo as a profile picture.

Parental Controls ✅

Amino has no parental controls to speak of, except for the ability to turn off incoming chat requests. This feature isn’t passcode locked, though, so a child could easily toggle it back on immediately.

If Amino isn’t something you feel comfortable with your child using, you can block it with Bark’s app blocking feature.

So, should my kid download it?

Frankly, no. Because Amino is essentially just tons and tons of enormous public chat rooms, it’s too risky an app to be reasonably safe for kids to use.