Chat apps can be a positive thing. When friends and family move away, you don’t have to lose touch, which can be particularly painful for kids. Moreover, families can find new groups of friends around shared interests or needs. That’s the appeal of an app like Yubo, but like other chat apps, there are pitfalls parents need to know.
What Is Yubo?
Yubo is a friend-finding chat app that allows users to communicate primarily via text and video; while it encourages livestreaming video from your device, it can also be used as a chat app.
Is Yubo A Dating App?
How people to chat or stream with may be mildly dismaying to some parents at first because it uses a similar structure to dating apps. You’re presented with a series of photos for a user, and then, swipe to confirm or deny interest in chatting. As a result, it can be mistaken for Tinder and other apps that use a “swipe” configuration to confirm interest. However, Yubo has no other dating app features. This can also be disabled within the app.
Does Yubo Have An Age Limit?
Yubo does require you to be 13 or older to sign up for an account, and matches users with their stated age range, teens with teens, and adults with adults. It also may make suggestions based on location, if that feature is enabled at the operating system and app level. If somebody knows your phone number, they can search for you through that as well, if you provide the app with that number.
What Can I Enable or Disable In Yubo?
Yubo’s settings allow parents to disable location services, hide profiles from the “swipe” section of the app, and hide your phone number if you provide it to the app. It’s generally worth doing all of these for teens, especially if you’re concerned about safety.
In addition, you should enable certain phone-level protections, like disabling location services, if you’re concerned about teens accidentally providing their info to strangers. Be aware that this may shut off other services, like location tracking, so you may want to use parental control apps to disable these services instead.
How Should I Manage Yubo?
Start with your overall rules. Every family should have rules about chat apps, how they’re used, and what’s safe and what isn’t. If your kids want to use Yubo, they should talk it over with you.
Make sure they understand what’s safe to share and what isn’t. Remember that even a profile picture can tell people far more about you than you expect.
Yubo should be subject to the rules you apply through your parental control apps. Part of the problem with chat apps is they can distract from homework, chores, and bedtime. Cutting them off during certain hours will help.
Kids need to be able to talk to you about what they might see and hear on Yubo, so make it clear they can always come to you without judgment and you’ll help them work out issues.
To learn more about how parental control apps can manage chat apps like Yubo, try it for free!
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