“As a parent, I would be very wary of a child of mine using an anonymous messaging app,” he says.
“Yes, parents should be concerned about Kik,” says Stephen Balkam, the founder and CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute, “but they shouldn’t be terrified.”īalkam points to the anonymity allowed on Kik as a key reason for his concern.
We are reviewing all aspects of safety in an effort to further improve the experience for our users.” The company added that it will provide more details on its safety program “as we make progress on these ongoing efforts”. Kik declined to be interviewed for this story but said in a statement: “Online safety is Kik’s number one priority as a company. The perpetrator pretended to be a young girl himself in order to persuade 45 victims, aged 8-14, to share child abuse material with him. In January, for example, a 25-year-old Louisiana man was convicted of using Kik to extort young girls into providing him with nude photographs. It’s a rough environment for young people Kik isn't designed to create bad behavior, but that happens on anonymous apps. Local news reports are chock-full of tales of predators using the app to prey on children, either by contacting potential victims before meeting and raping them or by extracting child abuse material from them. That combination of youth and anonymity has proved exceedingly valuable to Kik, which has been valued at $1bn, but also dangerous to some of its young users.
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Is it dangerous?Īnonymity is an important touchstone of free speech on the internet, and teens are an important target demographic for internet startups. A third received a message asking if she would “like to show your cute feet”. Within a day of downloading Kik, two Guardian reporters were sent unsolicited photographs of butts and breasts. That freedom seems to foster a certain breed of cyber-libertinism. You don’t need to link your account to a phone number, and you don’t need to use your real name. While the ability to match people up with strangers for a conversation is nothing new (remember AOL chatrooms?), what’s concerning to many parents and internet safety experts is that Kik is anonymous. Two of the top five internal apps are Flirt!, which gives you a list of users in your age range to, well, flirt with, and Match & Chat, a Tinder-for-Kik that lets you swipe left or right on users and chat with the people who swipe right on you too. Does it encourage flirting?Ĭrucially, you can find and chat with total strangers on Kik. You can play mobile games, make memes, watch videos, listen to music, and check out the funniest content on Reddit. The app has a built-in web browser and all sorts of internal native apps, which means that once you arrive in Kik, there’s very little reason to leave. You log in, you pick a user name, and you send texts, selfies, and emojis to your friends.īut that’s just the first level of the Kik experience, which is clearly designed with a teenage user in mind (“For Kik, youth are the primary focus,” founder and CEO Ted Livingston wrote in 2014). What is Kik, and why are kids so into it?Īt first glance, Kik is just another free messaging app for smartphones. News that a 13-year-old girl, Nicole Madison Lovell, chatted with an 18-year-old man on Kik the night before he kidnapped and murdered her, however, has added urgency to the parental quest of understanding what kids are getting up to on their phones these days.
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