I’ve been hearing a lot about Peeple lately. It’s a somewhat controversial app that has been described as the Yelp for people, which basically means that like Yelp helps you rate and connect with local businesses, Peeple lets you rate humans. It allows you to recommend and be recommended by the people you interact with in your daily life.
How Peeple works
There are 3 ways you could know someone – personally, professionaly and romantically. Using these categories, you can provide a recommendation and they can do the same with you. This all seems awesome until you get a negative review.
This is the digital version of the burn book in Mean Girls and instead of the entire school finding out, anyone with internet access can learn what others think of you. Did things end suddenly at your last job? Currently fighting with an old friend from high school? All of these could end badly, but what really piqued my interest was dating.
Peeple allows you to rate ex lovers
Because most of us want to let others know what a great partner so and so was. Not. The Talking Tech roundtable weighed in on the app and described it as a “new low for online comments”.
But according to the FAQ section, Peeple doesn’t tolerate the stuff below and takes any violation very serisouly. Your access is revoked if you violate the terms and conditions.
profanity, bullying, health references, disability references, confidential information, mentioning other people in a recommendation that you are not currently writing a recommendation for, name calling, degrading comments, abuse, derogatory comments, sexual references, racism, legal references, hateful content, sexism, and other parameters in our terms and conditions.
You have full control over what is shared about you
If an angry ex lover or former BFF sends a negative recommendation, you get to decide whether to publish it or not. Recommendations never go live without your permission. You can delete any recommendation from your inbox. You can also block or report users. Although the “truth license” could change that.
The Truth License is a paid upgrade in the app to see all the recommendations that were not published on people’s profile. It isn’t available yet.
Backlash
In October last year, news broke of the app and CEO and Co-Founder Julia Cordray experienced such a backlash that she had to go into hiding for her own safety. Since then, the CEO has appeared on talk shows and in leading publications defending Peeple. She even appeared on Dr Phil.
With all of this negativity, why would I download Peeple?
According to their site, ForThePeeple, you can
Create a safe place to manage your online reputation in a digital space and online community.
Enhance Your Online Reputation – for access to better quality networks, top job opportunities, and promote more informed decision making about people.
Asset Protection – protect your children, money, house, pets, assets by having more information about the people you interact with.
Build Positive Relationships – boost up the people you know and form stronger relationships by having a 2 way communication system based on feedback and recommendations.
But if I control my reputation, won’t everyone?
No rational person will publish negative recommendations about themselves, so how will you get to know the real person. This is PR at its best. It will be interesting to see how people start using the app to deal with public shaming disasters.
Download Peeple for iOS here. (Android coming soon)
Tech Girl wants to know: what do you think of the app? Would you use it?
