Yellow App Turns Snapchat into Tinder for Teenagers! What????

As if there isn’t enough to worry about when it comes to young people sending inappropriate images, sexting and generally causing themselves and their online reputation damage out comes another app that would appear to make it easier for users of Snapchat and Instagram to connect with complete strangers

When it comes to trying to find friends on Snapchat, follow them or just connect – it can be a little difficult. There are some other 3rd party apps to help with this – Ghostcode – being one of them. But it is an app that is not as easy as say Facebook for finding and following friends.

Enter Yellow. A new App which not only makes it easier to find friends on Snapchat but also automatically adds your matches to your Snapchat contacts.  Users choose who to chat to and share from photographs, Yellow enables you to connect to Snapchat and use the swipe left or right principle from dating app Tinder – so when Yellow is connected to Snapchat it is essentially a ‘Tinder for Teens’.

Age restriction is officially 17+, but as we already know, 13 year olds are more than capable of counting backwards and making themselves 17 years old for the purposes of downloading an app. Parents this is where you have to come in and link their app accounts to yours so you have to approve any downloads. Yes this is ok to do with your teenagers, you are their parents!!

Yellow sells itself with the ability to join a community of 1,000,000 people around the world. So yes, a lot of people are already using this and strangers around the world are now more easily able to connect on SnapChat.

The idea behind the app is that it matches users thereby gaining access to a huge Snapchat market – of young users.

The App has already started to gain popularity amongst teenagers. According to one student in a recent article in a paper in Ireland, it’s being used to swap nude and semi-nude pics. ‘People would send nudes and underwear pictures, boys and girls both – it’s mostly used to text and get pictures from each other’ she said.

She added that it’s not just for meeting ‘friends’ but is being used to ‘flirt with people from around the country and even further afield’. So two issues here, peer pressure to send pictures and adult opportunists – there are predators out there, the internet is not a safe place, and the sooner we talk about this openly, the sooner we can do something about it.

Signing up for Yellow has of course been made ultra simple. To register it asks for your mobile number and once verified it wants your name, birthday, sex and asks ‘Are you looking for Boys, Girls or Both?’ So no illusion to the fact that this is a dating functionality.

Once registration is complete Yellow asks if you want to meet people nearby.

Side Note for Parents and Teachers

There is no doubt that we live in a world in which the social media landscape is changing on a daily basis, with a myriad of new apps launching constantly, posing real dangers to our children and young people. It’s important for parents to become more ‘digitally’ informed and start to set some boundaries and restrictions for children and young people, just like we do offline. See above regarding linked iTunes account.

They can’t un-see things and they cant ‘un-experience them’.

Most importantly children and young people need to be educated, informed, resilient and motivated to protect themselves. We can only help them with this, if we are in this position in the first place.