What Is The Yellow App? Parents, Police Worried About Teen Safety, Privacy

Parenting Generation Z requires a different set of skills than any previous generation. With rapidly changing technology and means of communication, parents have the extra responsibility of teaching their kids how to navigate online social spaces.

The rule used to be “don’t talk to strangers” but now strangers can be found far more easily especially with apps like “Yellow,” an app with the tagline “make new friends.” It’s designed to help kids and teens make new friends, kind of like many popular dating apps.

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The lines between stranger and friend and what’s considered safe and what isn’t have changed as technology has. It can be hard to keep up with all the latest apps, but police and parents are particularly concerned about this app.

It looks innocent enough on your home screen, it’s just a yellow box. But once you open the app, you can view a bunch of profiles that belong to teens with their photos, names, ages and locations.

It works kind of like Tinder does, users swipe right if they like the person, or left if they don’t, if both users swipe right on one another they’re connected as friends and can message one another, the app also saves friends so you can strike up a conversation with the person whenever you like.

While the app is for kids ages 12 and up, the rating section in the App Store warns of “infrequent/mild alcohol, tobacco, or drug use references” and “infrequent/mild sexual content and nudity,” among other warnings. On Google Play there is no such warning and the app is rated “teen.” The app’s community guidelines forbid users under 18 to friend users over 18, but hypothetically your 13 year old could be chatting with a 17 year old who’s going on 18.

Yellow also allows users who become friends to connect on other apps like Snapchat and Instagram, two apps that allow users to communicate via messages that disappear. Other apps like Whisper and kik allow users to interact with strangers as well.

Parents and officials are concerned about how easily the app allows strangers to pose as someone else, with the ultimate worry being that such a person could be a predator looking to harm a teen using the app.