Advocating for openness, safety and privacy: Yubo’s Transparency Report

Openness, safety and privacy are of incredible importance today when it comes to social discovery apps. These values are the backbone of user trust, something we always strive towards here at Yubo. Our bi-annual Transparency Report is an essential expression of these values that allow us to build new features and additions to the app with user safety in mind. Covering periods from January to June and from July to December, they provide an overview of all the achievements of our safety strategy and the safeguards we employ during respective periods. Our Transparency Report is available on our website to all: our users, journalists and any safety authorities and overseers. Published since 2021, they have been a trusted resource for anyone interested in how Yubo handles the safety of our users.

What’s inside?

Our Transparency Report is usually divided into three sections: Behind the scenes, Safety on Yubo and Key Metrics. While the first section is largely introductory, offering some information about the app, our values and covering any new developments, the other two offer more detailed insight into policies and metrics.

Safety on Yubo

This section begins with an outline of the safety strategy we are following. Yubo is a strong advocate of the “Safety by Design” approach: rather than mitigating unwanted behaviours, we aspire to build the app in a way that prevents violations before any harm is caused. As a part of this approach, we rely heavily on innovative content moderation technology and develop algorithms detecting suspicious or inappropriate behaviours. Alongside these measures, we also educate our users through safety alerts and refer them to our Community Guidelines when appropriate.

Outlining the teams responsible for specific safety processes and tools, we move onto Yubo’s safety measures, among which there are detection technologies, human moderation, identity and age assurance, age gates, and more. Having established a lot of partnerships with NGOs, charities and other safety organisations, we always dedicate a page of the report to our Safety Board and our other safety-related partnerships. We also explain our reporting process in detail, outlining how and when we report illegal content to the police or other relevant law enforcement authorities.

Overall, this section is mainly dedicated to all the ways the Yubo team upholds user safety and privacy in a responsible and open manner. If you would like to know more about our safety tools and processes, make sure to read pages 14 to 31 of our latest report.

Key Metrics

This section of the report focuses more on numbers than processes. Here we report on how much content was removed from the platform, what kind of reports were made, and how many accounts were suspended and reinstated during the respective period. One significant chapter of this section that was introduced in the first half of 2023 is our report on the measures taken to fight hate, extremism and terrorism on our platform. Furthermore, in the second half of 2023, we have also added a section outlining the processes and metrics associated with ensuring safety of minors on our app. Lastly, a few final pages of the section are dedicated to permanent bans, user appeals and the live moderation technology we use to ensure our users’ safety whilst streaming live.

Our latest report

Our latest published Transparency Report covers the period from January to June 2024. It was published in September 2024 and is available here.

What’s new?

The biggest highlight of this period was tackling the rise of financial sexual extortion, otherwise known as sextortion, online. We worked on enhancing our detection systems to prevent users from sharing sensitive data. We were also sending out security alerts when our users were switching platforms or exchanging socials. Other than preventative measures, we focused on supporting sextortion victims by bettering our reporting systems and advising our users on how to seek assistance on Yubo and elsewhere.

Another goal for this period was to strengthen our “Platform Integrity” policy that is designed to protect our users from malicious online activity such as fraud or other ways of compromising user privacy.

We also revised criteria for substantial threats, making important changes to how we classify cases that involve imminent danger to our users and escalating them more effectively. Lastly, we enhanced the transparency of the reporting process by letting them know if the action was taken following a report they made to us.

Some numbers

Some important changes from our latest Report will be outlined as compared to our 2023’s report below.

As a result of our proactive detection strategy and “Safety by design” approach, our proactive detection reports went up from 85% to 92.5%. We also sent out more alerts compared to the previous six months after we strengthened the way we flag identity misrepresentation.

Over the last six months, we have learnt to better moderate some types of content proactively – for instance, moderated textual content on Yubo went up from 4% to 41.2%, highlighting our increased ability to work with this type of content.

There were no changes to the Child Safety chapter of the Metrics section in this report – Yubo will be reporting the statistics for 2024 in our end of the year report, coming in the beginning of 2025.

In conclusion

Here at Yubo, we take the safety and privacy of our users seriously. We will always uphold the highest standards when it comes to proactively detecting any instances of harm, and we want to thank our users for playing a big role in making the Internet safer through reporting any suspicious activity on the app. Make sure to check out our latest report and stay tuned for the next one. In the meantime, check out this article about staying safe online, and enjoy connecting and forging friendships on Yubo!