Child safety

Content or conduct that sexualises a child has no place on Vutalk. This page states our policy, what we do about it, and what our own design prevents us from doing.

Our policy

Using Vutalk to produce, request, share, solicit or promote child sexual abuse material, or to groom or sexually extort a minor, is prohibited without exception. Accounts found to be doing so are terminated permanently, and we report them to the competent authorities where we are able and required to.

Vutalk is not directed to children under 13, and where local law sets a higher minimum age, that age applies.

How to report

Email xiaosan9288@gmail.com with "Child safety" in the subject line. Include the username or link involved and, if the report concerns a group, the invitation link. Do not attach the material itself. We treat these reports ahead of everything else.

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

What we can and cannot detect

We want to be exact about this rather than imply a capability we do not have. Message content is end-to-end encrypted, so we cannot scan conversations, and we will not add a mechanism to do so — such a mechanism would be available to anyone who later compelled or compromised us, and would break the guarantee every user relies on.

What we can act on: reports from participants, publicly shared usernames and group invitation links, and abuse signals visible without reading content, such as mass unsolicited messaging. Accounts are terminated on that basis.

Vutalk's design also removes the mechanism most often used to reach children at scale: there is no contact discovery and no way to search for a stranger. An account can only be reached by someone who was given its username.