GameBuddy — Child Safety Standards

Version 2026-08-20. These are GameBuddy’s published standards against child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE). They are referenced from the app’s store listings and are the document Google Play’s Child Safety Standards policy requires a social app to publish.

GameBuddy is an adults-only service. Nobody under 18 may hold an account. That does not make this document unnecessary — a service that shows photographs of strangers and opens private conversations is exactly the kind of place people try to use for these purposes, whatever the stated age of everybody on it — so what follows is written as an operating procedure rather than as a statement of intent.

---

1. What these standards cover

CSAE — child sexual abuse and exploitation — means any conduct that sexualises, abuses or exploits a person under 18. It includes, and is not limited to:

• CSAM, child sexual abuse material: any image or video depicting a minor in a sexual manner, including drawn, rendered or AI-generated depictions.
• Grooming — building a relationship with a minor in order to sexually abuse or exploit them, on this service or anywhere else.
• Sextortion — coercing anybody with sexual imagery, and coercing a minor by any means.
• Trafficking, or advertising a minor for sexual purposes.
• Solicitation and sexual contact — sending sexual content to a minor, asking a minor for sexual imagery of themselves, sexual conversation or roleplay with a minor, or arranging to meet a minor for sexual purposes.
• Sexualised commentary about a minor, and the sharing of links, usernames, invitations or codes that lead to any of the above on another service.

A minor is anybody under 18, regardless of what any account claims.

2. Our position

There is no tolerance for any of this on GameBuddy, and none of it requires a pattern of behaviour before we act. A single instance is enough to terminate an account permanently.

The prohibition is stated in our Terms of Service, which every account holder accepts at registration, and it is written there in the same terms it is written here: content that sexualises any person under 18 in any way is forbidden, and using GameBuddy to move somebody to another service in order to do something forbidden here is forbidden too.

3. Nobody under 18 holds an account

• Registration asks for a date of birth, not an age. The date is validated on the server, not by the app, and an account it puts under 18 is refused outright.
• There is no younger tier, no parental-consent route and no supervised mode. There is no configuration of GameBuddy in which a minor is a legitimate user.
• If we learn that an account holder is under 18, we close the account and delete the data associated with it, without waiting for the account holder to respond.
• Anyone — account holder or not — can tell us that an account belongs to a minor by writing to [email protected]. We act on those reports whether or not the person reporting can prove it; the cost of closing an adult’s account in error is far lower than the alternative.

What this is, and what it is not. A date of birth checked on the server is stronger than a number typed into a settings field, and it does not go stale. It is still a self-declaration, and we say so plainly rather than describe it as verification. It is the reason the rest of this document exists.

4. Screening before anything is published

• Every uploaded profile photograph is screened by an automated classifier before any other account can see it. Images the classifier is confident are sexual are refused. Images it is unsure about are held unpublished, visible only to their owner, until a human decides — an uncertain verdict is never treated as approval.
• Text is screened on every surface where it is typed — profiles, direct messages and lobbies. Slurs and sexual abuse are refused rather than masked, and on public surfaces email addresses, links and phone numbers are stripped, because moving a conversation off-platform is the first move in most of what section 1 describes.
• A private conversation requires a mutual match. No account can open a conversation with another that has not independently chosen them, which removes unsolicited contact as a route.
• Blocking is immediate, mutual and silent. A blocked account cannot see, match with, or continue a conversation with the person who blocked it, and is not told that it happened.

The limits, stated honestly. The image classifier answers one narrow question — does this look sexual — probabilistically. It does not recognise a minor, a photograph taken without consent, or a picture of a screen showing either. A word filter does not understand context. Automated screening raises the cost of casual abuse and buys time; it is not a moderation policy. What protects people is the report control and a human who answers it.

5. Reporting, inside the app and outside it

In the app, without leaving it. Every profile carries a report control, reachable from anywhere that profile appears. Every message in a conversation can be reported by the person who received it. Both sit beside a block control, so somebody can stop the contact first and explain afterwards. Reports are recorded once per reporter per item, so a report count means what it appears to mean.

Outside the app. Anybody — including someone who does not use GameBuddy, and including a parent, a guardian, a hotline or a police force — can report to [email protected]. No account is needed.

What we commit to. Every report is reviewed and acted on within 24 hours. Acting means removing the content, terminating the account, or recording that the report was not founded.

A report alleging CSAE is not held to that window. It is triaged ahead of everything else in the queue and acted on as soon as it is seen, because the 24 hours exist to bound how long an ordinary complaint waits, not to license a delay on this one. What acting means here is section 6.

6. What happens to CSAE and CSAM

When a report, or our own review, gives us actual knowledge of CSAE:

1. The content is removed immediately and stops being served to anybody. We do not wait for confirmation from anyone else before removing it; a wrongly removed photograph can be restored, and the alternative cannot be undone.
2. The account is terminated permanently. Not suspended, not warned. Any other account we can attribute to the same person goes with it.
3. The material and the account records are preserved rather than deleted, out of reach of ordinary deletion, so that they remain available to law enforcement. This is a deliberate exception to our usual practice of deleting data when an account closes: the obligation to preserve evidence overrides the ordinary erasure route, and our Privacy Policy is where what we keep, and for how long, is set out.
4. We report it, in every case. Confirmed CSAM is reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) through the CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org, which accepts reports from providers outside the United States, and to the authorities in our own jurisdiction: the Finnish Police (emergency 112; poliisi.fi) and Nettivihje, the Finnish reporting hotline operated by Save the Children Finland and a member of the INHOPE network. Reporting is not conditional on where the account holder is, on whether the material was shared with anybody, or on our being able to identify anyone involved.
5. We cooperate. We respond to lawful requests from police forces, courts and recognised hotlines, and we do not require a report to have arrived through the app before we act on it.
6. We correct our own mistakes. An account holder who believes their account was terminated in error can write to the address in section 7 and a person will look at it again. This is a route for a wrong decision, not an appeal against a confirmed one: where the material is what it appeared to be, the termination stands and is not negotiable.

We do not conduct our own investigation beyond establishing that the content is what it appears to be. Identifying and pursuing an offender is a matter for the authorities, and an amateur investigation risks the evidence they need.

7. Child safety point of contact

• Name — Can Baturlar
• Role — operator of GameBuddy, and its designated child safety point of contact
• Email — [email protected]
• Answered within — 24 hours, ahead of everything else

This is the address for Google, for law enforcement, for hotlines and NGOs, and for any member of the public raising a child safety concern. It receives child safety notifications from Google Play, and the person who answers it is the same person who reviews the moderation queue and decides what happens to an account — so a question about how a report was handled, or a demand that something be taken down, reaches somebody who can answer it and act on it rather than somebody who has to pass it on.

It is monitored, it is kept separate from the ordinary support queue so that nothing urgent sits behind a question about billing, and it is the same address named as the contact in our terms and our privacy policy.

GameBuddy is operated from Finland by Can Baturlar, an individual, and is subject to Finnish and EU law — including the sexual offences provisions of the Finnish Criminal Code (Chapter 20) and the GDPR. We comply with the child safety laws of the jurisdictions we operate in, and with Google Play’s Child Safety Standards policy and Developer Program Policies.

8. Keeping this document true

One person operates GameBuddy, reviews the moderation queue, and answers the address above. We would rather say that than imply a trust and safety department that does not exist — what matters to somebody making a report is whether the commitment in section 5 is met, and it is a commitment made in full knowledge of who has to meet it.

These standards are reviewed at least once a year, and whenever the service changes in a way that affects any of them. The version string at the top of this document changes when the text does.

9. Where each requirement is answered

Google Play’s Child Safety Standards policy asks five things of an app in the social and dating categories. This is where each of them is dealt with, so that anybody checking — a reviewer, a regulator, or somebody deciding whether to trust the app — can find the answer rather than take our word for it.

Requirement	Section
Published standards prohibiting CSAE	§1, §2
An in-app mechanism for users to report concerns	§5
Procedures for addressing CSAM, including removal on actual knowledge	§6
Compliance with child safety laws, and reporting confirmed CSAM to NCMEC	§6, §7
A designated child safety point of contact	§7