Want to Judge Your Fellow Humans? There’s an App for That

Because we’re all not insecure enough, there’s a new app out there that let’s people rate other people on a scale of 1-5.  There’s no need to take their class,(Rate Your Professor) or eat at their restaurant (Yelp) or ride in their car (Uber)- now you can rate someone just for breathing, and if you don’t like the way they breathe, you can tell the whole world about it on the Peeple App. 

They may be truly naive or they may be disingenuous (we’ve seen greed and self-serving rhetoric masquerading as idealism from other companies), but the two founders claim that the purpose of the app is about uplifting people –to borrow from The Princess Bride, I don’t think that word means what they think it means.   As with all things digital, there are terms and conditions that the founders say will allow them to prevent bullying on the site.  But I’m not so sure – Twitter and Facebook have no-bullying policies (or their equivalent) and that hasn’t really stopped the bullying…. 

It’s unclear whether the app will survive regulators’ scrutiny as it requires the poster to submit the subject’s phone number in order to create the subject’s profile.