WSJ – June 15 – 15M people had downloaded Skout. ~15% of the users were 13 to 17 years old. On Tuesday, that all changed. Skout suddenly shut down its teen community amid reports that predators allegedly connected with minors and raped or sexually assaulted them, using Skout’s app to facilitate the meetings. “We would ban all users from Skout if we had to, if we felt their safety was at risk, and we wouldn’t wait to do it,” CEO Wiklund said. Could Skout have prevented the situation with better technology? According to Wiklund, Skout’s security measures already included algorithms and bots that automatically looked for “bad behavior” by users. Skout also used crowdsourced photo moderation provided by Crowdflower to monitor profiles for pornographic content. The teen community generated about 20% of the company’s revenue, the CEO reports. Revenue was not a consideration in shutting it down, he said. Social networks, from Skout to Facebook, have yet to crack the code of accurate age verification online. Credit cards might be a potential avenue to online identity verification. But Wiklund says, “Teens don’t generally have credit cards.” Instead, Skout is considering other approaches. These may involve verifying a user’s identity against their profiles on Facebook.
by Lora Kolodny
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