Yubo

Is Yubo safe?

For adults, it is a reasonable choice among stranger-chat apps; for teenagers, it is no longer an option at all. Yubo, made by the Paris company Twelve-App and once known as "Tinder for teens", closed its teen community in 2025. Since 1 November 2025 the minimum age is 18, and every new account goes through a face-based age check. The app has no third-party ad networks, and its privacy policy gives exact deletion times. What remains is the risk built into its main feature: live video and private chat with people you do not know. We score it 56/100, ahead of Wizz (47), which still admits 16-year-olds.

Why Yubo went adults-only

Yubo announced the change in November 2025. It said users aged 13 to 15 made up fewer than 5% of its base, that it had notified them first, and then deactivated 16- and 17-year-olds country by country, finishing on 29 October 2025. It cited an in-app survey in which 92% of respondents wanted the app to be for young adults only. The June 2026 terms now say plainly that you must be at least 18, and that accounts found or suspected to be under that age are permanently banned.

That matters because Yubo's history with minors was poor. In 2022 a Sunday Times reporter posing as a 15-year-old found no real age or identity checks, received sexual propositions and saw racist abuse and threats, City AM reported. The same year, after the Uvalde school shooting, young users told NBC News that they had reported an account believed to belong to the gunman for disturbing live comments and that little was done. Yubo banned the account and added ways to attach recordings to reports.

Age checks and moderation

Yubo says it was the first major social platform to require age assurance from all users, starting in 2022. At sign-up you take a selfie, and Yoti's facial age estimation compares the result with the birthday you entered. Yoti returns only an age result and keeps no image. When there is a serious safety concern, Yubo can ask for a valid ID, which it deletes within a few days of checking.

The policy also describes automated scanning of text, images, video and profile data to spot rule breaking, fake profiles and underage users, with human moderators behind it. No age check is perfect, and an adult who passes it can still lie about everything else in a profile.

Yubo also reports suspected child sexual exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline: 731 reports in 2025, down from 1,714 in 2024, the year before it closed its teen community, according to NCMEC's yearly lists. The counts show that Yubo detects and reports cases, not how common abuse is on the app.

What Yubo does with your data

Less than most free social apps, but more than its App Store label shows. Apple's label says usage data is used to track you across other companies' apps, and that purchases, contact info, user content and identifiers are linked to you, partly for Yubo's own marketing. The June 2026 privacy policy adds more: Yubo keeps your age-check selfie for as long as the account exists, may collect precise GPS location with your consent to suggest nearby people, and processes advertising IDs to measure its marketing campaigns.

Yubo earns money from subscriptions and in-app purchases, not ad networks, and the policy says it does not sell personal data. Google Play's label says device IDs are shared for analytics and advertising.

Deletion times are clearer than at most rivals. Direct messages are deleted after two years, photos sent in chat after one year, and live video within minutes to hours unless it is reported. GPS data is replaced on each visit and kept no longer than two months. Download and deletion both sit in the app settings.

Security

Google Play says data is encrypted in transit. Chats and lives are not end-to-end encryptedEnd-to-end encryptionEncryption in which only the sender and the recipient can read a message. The company running the service cannot see its content.More in the glossary; Yubo reads them to moderate. We found no bug bounty on HackerOne or Bugcrowd and no reported breach, and the policy's security section is a short general statement.

How to use Yubo more safely

1. Keep precise location off. City-level discovery is enough to meet people, and a stranger does not need your street.
2. Treat anything you show on a live as public: other users can screen-record it.
3. Move to another app or meet in person only with people you have talked to for a while, and meet in public.
4. Block and report anyone who asks for intimate images or money, and attach a screenshot or recording to the report.
5. Use "Get my data" in the privacy settings to see what Yubo holds, and "Delete my account" when you leave.

How we scored it

Regulatory record (86) is the strongest factor: no fines or orders. Security and scams and harmful content (both 50) are the weakest factors. Security has no end-to-end encryptionEnd-to-end encryptionEncryption in which only the sender and the recipient can read a message. The company running the service cannot see its content.More in the glossary and no bug bounty. The second is held down because live video with strangers remains the product and the teen years left a long record of problems, though the adults-only rule and universal age checks keep it from dropping lower. Transparency and control (64) benefits from clear retention times and in-app deletion.