“Access numerous profiles of single teenagers from your country or region to find love or friends”: the promise has something that will attract the youngest but that will especially worry parents. In any case, it is about “Dating Teens”, a site created in 2006 and derived from an application in 2022, which offers young people between the ages of 13 and 25 to discuss in private according to the people closest to home.
Completely free because it is supported by advertising, the dating site only requires the name, age and some photos of the Internet user. An ease of access that has something that attracts the youngest, but also exposes them to numerous dangers.
“€150 negotiable”
As many netizens have pointed out, the site hosts many people with unequivocal and totally illegal intentions. “A friend tells me about an application that she had heard about with her son. I’ll take a look at it. I have a 13-year-old profile without a photo. 8 friend requests. 5 private messages in half an hour,” explains this Internet user for Example , supporting photo showing contact profiles of “mature” men. One of them introduces himself as “a real man, with the financial means to please.”
Other Internet users, for their part, share the open incitement to prostitution: for example, men who admit to being over 35 or even willing to pay several hundred euros for sexual favors.
Category “For adults” in Play Store
In the Play Store feedback, multiple people who downloaded the app are reporting the same issues, along with glitches. The app is also associated with the PEGI-18 label, which means that it belongs to the “For Adults” category, although it is usually reserved for teenagers aged 13 and over.
The company does not specify whether or not this classification prevents the download of the application by a certain category of people, in particular those under 18 years of age, and has not yet responded to Tech&Co in this regard.
On Teen Encounter’s side, the point of view is clear: “It is strictly forbidden to complete your profile with false information” and, above all, “minors over 13 must ask their parents for permission”, specify the rules present in the page. place. A rule that is not necessarily respected because it is not controlled. The site’s director, a Belgian named Thomas Mester, even admitted to having Release in 2019 that this directive was “more for [se] protect”.
3 moderators for 287,000 users
But what about moderation in 2023? With Tech&Co, Teen Encounter indicates that it has 3 moderators in its ranks and estimates “it would take 10” to regulate the “287,084” declared users.
A small ad has also been published on the site to recruit moderators, who must be part of the community of verified members of the platform.
For missions, the principle is the same “as on all other community sites”, with moderators allowed to remove comments or photos. The platform tells Tech&Co to ban a hundred people a day. The site also specifies that a sanction system has even been established, with different degrees depending on the severity of the infraction.
However, aware that any user can simply recreate an email address or use a VPN, Teen Encounter wants to establish an SMS validation system.
But this functionality is considered too expensive for the Belgium-based company, with an estimated SMS sending service between “0.08 euros and 0.1 euros per SMS sent.” “Our site is free and we survive on advertising, and each member is valued at more or less 0.02 euros, so it is impossible to verify it by SMS,” adds the platform.
Some profiles considered suspicious by site employees may also receive a “Possibly Fake” banner on their profile to notify other users of the risk of interacting with the individual.
No survey to date
Police services say they are very attentive to the issue and to these types of applications, of which Teen Encounter is far from the only example. However, according to information from Tech&Co, no investigation has been opened into the facts related to this application.
As a police source explains, this is largely due to the aforementioned lack of moderation and control within the apps, whose collaboration with the authorities is currently non-existent.
For its part, the government ensures that the safety of young people on the Internet is a priority. Invited by Franceinfo on August 22, the Secretary of State for Children, Charlotte Caubel, indicated that “the objective is not to ban certain sites but to regulate, limit and hold the platforms accountable”, since a ban would simply lead to migration to other sites.
The Secretary of State also indicated that the Pharos platform had the means to remove content and prosecute operators and sexual predators, including in Belgium. For its part, Teen Encounter asks Tech&Co not “to file a complaint instead of a person” and, in short, blames young users.
Above all, the platform specifies that it expects stricter regulation from the Belgian government. A mobile identity app, “Itsme”, launched in 2017, notably allows Belgian citizens to connect to certain platforms, largely linked to the banking sector.
In France, the law of July 7, 2023 only imposes for the moment an online majority of 15 years, which in theory regulates the use of social networks for the youngest. A device that is not currently applied. Parental controls will be installed by default on all computers starting in July 2024.
In the case of pornographic sites, the courts have decided not to block them yet in France, but they are still on notice for not having implemented an effective age verification system.
Source: BFM TV
