Child safety and parental controls

Hello World is built for families, which means children use it. This is what we do about that.

Our standard on child sexual abuse and exploitation

Hello World prohibits child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) absolutely. It is forbidden everywhere in the service — in private messages, in calls, in posts, in statuses, in profiles and in store listings — and it is the one rule with no warning, no second chance and no judgment call attached to it.

Specifically, the following are forbidden and will end an account immediately:

Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in any form: photographs, video, audio, drawings, generated or synthetic images, and text.
Sexualising a minor in any way, including in words.
Sexual or romantic approaches to a minor by an adult, and grooming of any kind.
Asking a minor for sexual images of themselves, or sharing such images.
Sextortion — threatening to publish intimate images to obtain more, money, or anything else.
Trafficking a child, or advertising a child for any such purpose.
Using the synthesized-voice feature, or any other feature, to produce material of this kind.

What we do when we learn of it. When we obtain actual knowledge of CSAM on Hello World we remove it, close the account permanently, preserve the evidence, and report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) or to the relevant authority in the jurisdiction concerned. We comply with applicable child safety laws and we co-operate with law enforcement.

Reporting it to us. Use Report in the app on the message, post or status — you do not have to leave the app to do it, and reports about a child’s safety go to the top of the queue. You can also write to support@helloworldmessenger.com with “Child safety” in the subject line; that address reaches a designated person, and it is the child-safety point of contact for Hello World and for El Hadji Fadilou Seck.

If a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. We are not an emergency service.

How old you have to be

Nobody under 13 can create a Hello World account.

From 13 until 16, an account needs a parent or guardian. Until a guardian’s request to supervise it has been accepted, the account can do little more than get that supervision: edit its profile, show its code, accept contact and supervision requests, report, send feedback, export its data, sign out and delete itself. Messages, posts, calls and everything else stay closed — and they close again if the supervision ends before 16. This is enforced on our server, not only in the app.

From 16, an account is the person’s own.

Everyone gives their date of birth when they sign up — or the first time they open the app, if the account was made with Apple, Google or an older version — and it can be entered only once, so a young person cannot edit their way out of supervision afterwards. Correcting a date that was entered wrongly is a guardian’s job, from Parental controls.

What is different for an account under 13

These are not settings a guardian has to find and switch on. They apply automatically to any account whose date of birth is under thirteen:

No public profile card. The share card that other accounts have does not exist for this one, so there is nothing to post or forward.
Not findable by search. The account does not appear when somebody searches by name, username, phone number or email — not even for people who have them in their contacts.
Reachable only through their family. New contact goes through people already linked to the account rather than arriving from strangers. A circle with a child in it cannot be found in search, and joining it makes nobody the child’s contact unless the child saved them first.

How supervision starts

A guardian asks; the child agrees. That order matters, and it is enforced:

A guardian sends a request from Parental controls in Settings.
The child is told, in their own language, that “Name asked to supervise your account”, with an explanation of what a guardian would be able to do.
Nothing changes until the child accepts. A pending request gives the person who sent it no powers at all — they cannot set restrictions, and they cannot see the child’s date of birth.
The child can decline. A decline holds for thirty days, so a request cannot be sent over and over as a way of pressing them.
The child can leave a supervision link later, and the guardian is told when they do.

Blocking someone prevents them from asking, and neither side is told why the request failed.

What a guardian can do

Once a link is accepted, a guardian can, from Parental controls:

Set what the supervised account is allowed to do — which features are available to it, and who may contact it.
Approve or refuse new contacts for it.
Answer permission requests the child raises.
Correct the child’s date of birth.
End the supervision.

What a guardian cannot do is read the child’s messages. Supervision in Hello World is about who can reach a child and what the account can do, not about surveillance of what they say. We think that is the right line, and we would rather say so plainly than let a parent assume otherwise.

If you are a parent

Set the account up together. The child has to accept the link, so this works better as a conversation than as an administrative act.
Talk about blocking and reporting. Both are in the app, both are explained on the safety page, and a child who knows where they are will use them.
Use your phone’s own controls as well. iOS Screen Time governs which apps can be used and when, which is a different job from the one Hello World does.
Ask us. support@helloworldmessenger.com.

A child’s data

A supervised account’s data is handled as any other account’s is, with the restrictions above on who can find and reach it. A supervised account, and any account under 16, is shown no sponsored item at all — our server leaves them out before anything is chosen. For everybody else the sponsored items are chosen without anyone’s profile, age, location, interests or messages; we do not profile children, there is no advertising identifier in the app at all, and Hello World AI Tools never process the data of anyone under 16.

A guardian may ask what data we hold about a child in their care, may ask for it to be corrected, and may ask for the account to be deleted — see deleting your account. Write to support@helloworldmessenger.com from the address on your own account.

Where the rest of the rules are

The full rules for everybody are the community guidelines. This page states the part of them that concerns children, and it is the published child-safety standard for Hello World.