Child Safety
Standards.

Who is allowed to use zZuP!

You must be at least 18 to create an account. This is stated in our Terms of Service and enforced at sign-up: the app requires a date of birth before an account can be completed, and an account that does not clear the age check cannot be created.

On Google Play our target age group is declared as 18 and over, and we have enabled Google's option to prevent users it identifies as minors from downloading or using the app. We know that neither measure is perfect — a determined minor can lie about a birthday, and Google cannot identify every minor. That is exactly why the rest of this page exists.

What is prohibited

Our Community Guidelines place the following in the zero-tolerance tier, meaning a single confirmed instance ends the account permanently:

• Any sexual content involving minors, in any form — image, video, drawing, text, or roleplay.
• Sexualising a minor, including describing, requesting, or soliciting such content.
• Grooming — building a relationship with a minor for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
• Sextortion — threatening to release intimate material in order to obtain more of it, money, or compliance.
• Trafficking or advertising a minor for sexual purposes.

This applies to content created about a real child and to content that is generated, drawn, or fictional. It applies whether the account is acting under its real identity or through its pet.

How we try to prevent it

Automated screening before publication

Text and images on the surfaces below are checked by an automated classifier before they are published. Content that trips the child-sexual-content category is blocked and never posted, and a record is raised for a human to review:

• Your profile — display name, bio, pet name and pet bio.
• zZuPer Roam — the note and image your pet carries to other students.
• zZuPer Pulse — the intent line you write before being matched.
• Images you send your pet, because those are forwarded to our AI provider.

The threshold for the child-sexual-content category is set deliberately low — far lower than for any other category — because we would rather block something innocent than publish something that is not.

What is not screened, and why we tell you

One-to-one messages and Pack (group) messages are not monitored. We do not read them and no classifier reads them. This is a deliberate design decision, it is stated on our Safety page and in our Google Play data disclosures, and we are not going to pretend otherwise here.

Under 18 U.S.C. §2258A(f), US providers are not required to monitor or affirmatively search their services. We do not. What that means in practice is that private material reaches us when somebody reports it — which is why reporting is built into every conversation, and why we act on reports quickly.

How to report a child safety concern

From inside the app, four routes:

• Hold any message and tap Report. The report is tied to that exact message.
• Open a profile — a person's or a pet's — and tap Report.
• Profile → Report a problem, for anything that is not a single message.
• Report the AI if your pet generates something harmful. That goes to us, not to a person.

You do not need a screenshot, and you can report an anonymous pet without knowing who is behind it — we can see the account, even when you cannot. Reports are confidential; we do not tell the reported person who reported them.

From outside the app: finance@zzup.org, or the contact form. If a child is in immediate danger, contact law enforcement first — we are not an emergency service.

In the United States you can also report directly to the NCMEC CyberTipline at report.cybertipline.org or 1-800-843-5678. You do not need our permission to do that, and you do not have to go through us.

What happens when we find it

On actual knowledge of apparent child sexual abuse material, in this order:

• The content comes down immediately. It stops being visible to anyone, in every place it appeared.
• The files are moved to a locked store. They are removed from the buckets the app can reach, so the person who uploaded them can no longer retrieve them, and placed somewhere only we can open.
• The account is permanently banned and its live sessions are killed. This is not a strike. There is no appeal path back to the same account.
• We report to NCMEC's CyberTipline as required by 18 U.S.C. §2258A, and we cooperate with law enforcement requests that follow.
• We preserve the material and related records for at least one year, as §2258A(h) requires, in a secure location with access limited to the people who need it. We do not delete it just because the account is gone.

A machine never makes the final call. An automated hit blocks the content and raises an alert; a human decides whether it is what it looks like. We would rather review a false positive than ban someone by algorithm — and rather block a false positive than publish the real thing.

Retention, and why deletion does not erase this

Deleting a zZuP! account erases the profile, but it does not erase sent messages, records of other people blocking you, or your zZuP ID — and it does not erase material preserved under §2258A(h). This is set out in full in our Privacy Notice. Someone cannot abuse a child, delete their account, and take the evidence with them.

Point of contact

Our designated child safety point of contact is reachable at finance@zzup.org. That address is monitored by a person who can speak to our CSAM prevention measures and our regulatory compliance, and it is the address we have registered for child-safety correspondence.

For everything else — general reports, appeals, press — admin@zzup.org.

Changes

We will update this page as our measures change, and the version number and date at the top will move with it. If we ever add hash-matching against known CSAM databases, or extend automated screening to further surfaces, it will be described here before we claim it anywhere else.