Child Safety Standards

An adults-only service

Woohoo is for adults. You must be 18 or over to use it, and that is not a suggestion: you have to confirm you are 18 or over before you can sign in at all, the age you give during signup is rejected if it is under 18, and the same rule is enforced again on our servers so it cannot be worked around by changing the app. Woohoo is also distributed with Google Play's minor restriction setting applied, so Play itself keeps the listing away from accounts it knows belong to children.

We are describing what we do, not making a promise about what every person in the world will manage to do. An age check asks someone to tell the truth, and a determined person can lie to it. That is exactly why the rest of this page exists: the age gate is the first thing standing in the way, not the only one.

Zero tolerance

We have no tolerance for child sexual abuse or exploitation of any kind. There is no version of it we treat as a borderline case, no warning, and no second chance. An account we find engaging in it is removed, and the matter is reported to the authorities. We would rather lose a user, or a hundred, than host this.

What is prohibited

Sexual content involving a minor. Any image, video, text or other material that sexualises a person under 18, whether it is real, drawn, edited or generated. Sharing it, asking for it, describing it or linking to it are all the same thing to us.

Any adult approaching a minor. Attempting to contact, befriend, groom, solicit or arrange to meet a person under 18 through Woohoo, or using Woohoo to move that contact somewhere else.

Being under 18. Using the service, or holding an account, when you are not yet 18. If you are under 18, Woohoo is not for you and we will remove your account if we find it.

How we find it

Photos are screened before anyone sees them. Every profile photo is checked automatically when it is uploaded, before it is shown to another person. A photo that fails is refused outright and never becomes visible. A photo the check will not vouch for is held back and waits for one of us to look at it, and while it waits nobody else can see it. Nothing a person uploads goes straight to other users unchecked.

People tell us. Automated checks catch images. They do not catch a conversation, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The people using Woohoo are the ones who notice when something is wrong, so reporting is built into the places where it would happen rather than buried in a help page. Every report reaches a person, not a queue nothing reads.

We want to be straight about the limits. We screen photos automatically; we do not automatically scan the words people write to each other. We do not participate in any image hash-matching programme. We are a new and small company, and we would rather tell you precisely what we do than imply a machine is watching everything.

How to report something

Report a person from a chat. In any conversation, tap the menu in the top right, or tap the other person's name, and choose Report. You can block them from the same menu, which stops their messages and makes each of you invisible to the other.

Report one specific message. Press and hold any message somebody else sent and choose Report this message. This tells us exactly which message you mean, rather than leaving us to guess from a conversation.

Report a person from their profile. Open their profile and choose Report or block at the bottom.

Tell us directly. Open Profile, choose Report a problem, and pick the Safety category. The same form is in Settings under Support. Use this one if what you need to say does not fit a report about a single person, or if you would rather write to us in your own words. You get a reference number back.

You can also email us at any time, including about something you saw and did not report in the app, at privacy@woohooau.com.

What we do about it

When we find child sexual abuse material, or an adult approaching a minor, we remove the content, we remove the account, and we report the matter to the relevant authorities in Australia and in Singapore. Account removal is done by a person, deliberately, rather than by an automatic rule, because this is not a decision we want a threshold making.

We do not destroy the evidence. Deleting an account on Woohoo clears the personal details attached to it, but the safety record does not go with it: reports, and the records of what happened, are kept so that an investigation is still possible afterwards. Somebody cannot delete their account to make a report against them disappear, and we will provide what we hold to law enforcement when they are entitled to it.

If you believe a child is in immediate danger, please contact your local police first. We are a company, not an emergency service, and the police can act faster than we can.

Our child safety contact

One named person is responsible for child safety at Woohoo, and reports about it reach them directly.

Dheeraj Palle, Director, Woohoo Social Pty Ltd
privacy@woohooau.com
Woohoo Social Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Australia

Write to that address about anything on this page. If you are reporting something urgent, say so in the subject line.

Legal compliance

These standards apply globally, to everyone using Woohoo, wherever they are. We comply with the child safety laws that apply to us in the places we operate, which today means Australia, where Woohoo Social Pty Ltd is incorporated, and Singapore, where the app is launching. We cooperate with lawful requests from authorities in those jurisdictions. Where our obligations grow as we enter new markets, this page will be updated to say so.

Our Privacy Policy explains what data we hold and how long we keep it, and our Terms set out the rules for using Woohoo.