Safety & community guidelines

Five short rules every Yoce family agrees to. If anyone breaks them, we'll act.

1. Be kind. No hateful, threatening, or harassing language to anyone, ever.
2. Keep it real. Don't impersonate other people. Don't pretend to be an adult if you're a kid, or a kid if you're an adult.
3. No grown-up content. No nudity, sexual content, graphic violence, drugs, or gambling.
4. Don't share private things. Phone numbers, home addresses, school details, anything that could put a child at risk. Even between trusted friends.
5. Tell a grown-up. If anything inside Yoce makes a kid feel uncomfortable, the first move is always to tell their parent.

Yoce's chat surface has two distinct circles, both parent-mediated:

• Family chat. A private thread that includes only the people the parent has invited to the family — themselves, the kids, family-member accounts (grandparents, aunts/uncles). Nobody else can see or join.
• Friend chat (cross-family). Available only when both parents — the requester's and the recipient's — approve the friendship. There is no public discovery, no friend-of-friend suggestion, no way to message anyone you weren't introduced to via a parent.

Kids never see or chat with strangers. Group chats are built from existing approved connections; they can't include anyone outside the parents' trust circle.

Every chat message and voice clip goes through automated checks before delivery:

• Profanity + harm filter. Messages containing sexual, violent, or hate content are blocked before they reach the recipient. The sender gets a note explaining why.
• Personal-information detection. Phone numbers, addresses, and school-style identifiers get a warning to both sender and parent.
• Voice message limits. 30-second cap, automatic deletion after 30 days, stored encrypted at rest.
• Audit log. Every action (message sent, friend approved, star awarded) is logged with timestamp and actor. Parents can review the family's full activity from Settings → Privacy.

Two paths, depending on where you are. Always go to the in-app option first for the fastest action.

• In the app. Long-press any message or voice clip and tap Report. We review every report within 24 hours; serious reports (safety, hate, sexual content) within 4 hours.
• By email. Write to safety@yoce.com with a screenshot and the family code. We answer every email — usually within one working day.
• If a child is in immediate danger, please contact your local emergency services first. Then email us — we'll preserve all relevant data for the investigation.

• Approval flow. Spend requests, friend requests, and high-impact actions all queue for parent approval before they happen.
• Restricted hours. Schedule when chat is available — by day-of-week and time-of-day, with a separate "all-app" lock window for sleep / school.
• Family-member roles. Grandparents and trusted relatives can give stars and message kids, but they can't change settings, invite new friends, or manage the family bank.
• One-tap mute. A parent can hide any friendship or chat from a kid's view without alerting the other side.
• Full audit log + export. Settings → Privacy → Export shows everything we hold about your family, in JSON, anytime.
• Delete account anytime. A 30-day scheduled deletion at /account/delete or in Settings — you can change your mind within the window.

Yoce is built to comply with the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the UK Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC), and GDPR-K across the EU.

• Kids never have first-party accounts. Parents create accounts; they create kids inside their own family. Kids sign in with a simple username and PIN — no email, no phone number, no behavioural profile.
• Verifiable parental consent. At signup we verify the parent's email with a 24-hour-delayed second-touch (the COPPA "Email Plus" method) before any kid feature unlocks.
• No ads on any kid surface. No third-party trackers. No behavioural analytics on the kid surface. The parent app uses cookieless Vercel Analytics, opted in via an explicit cookie banner.
• Data residency. Yoce data is stored on Supabase's EU-West region by default.
• No data sale. Ever. Yoce's revenue model is a parent-paid subscription; we have no incentive to monetise your family's data.

Full details: /privacy and the kid-facing notice at /privacy/kids.

Most reports resolve with a quiet warning. The following will result in immediate account suspension pending review, and likely permanent removal:

• Any sexual content involving a minor — reported to authorities under our legal obligations.
• Threats of violence against a person.
• Coordinated harassment.
• Impersonating a parent to access a child's account.
• Using the app to facilitate any commercial transaction outside the parent's control.

If you are a safety researcher, journalist, or child-protection organisation, we'd love to hear from you. We publish security reports under coordinated disclosure and welcome external review of our moderation and consent flows. Write to safety@yoce.com.

I started Yoce because I wanted my own kids on a place that was warm and small, not a place that sells their attention. That means I'm on the hook for every safety call we make.

If you ever feel that Yoce is missing something a family needs — or that we've got something wrong — please tell me directly: hello@yoce.com.