There’s no way such a rating could ever accurately reflect the person in question: Even putting issues of personality and subjectivity aside, all rating apps, from Yelp to Rate My Professor, have a demonstrated problem with self-selection.
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“If the person you are searching for is not in the app you can add their name, profile picture, and start their profile by rating them”.
To launch in November, the app, “Peeple”, will allow you to rate everyone in your life on a one- to five-star scale. Surely you can remove yourself from Peeple? “As two empathetic, female entrepreneurs in the tech space, we want to spread love and positivity”.
Pointing to a few gross simplicity of forethought, or simply a desire for information about potential babysitters that trumps all notions of decency or privacy, Cordray and McCullough suggest that their app won’t cause harm, and it’s just a mode of researching the people in your life. “We want to operate with thoughtfulness”. Additionally, any negative reviews will be held for 48 hours in case the individual in question disputes the review.
One particularly amusing episode of the sitcom Community imagined the dire consequences of what would happen if a smartphone app gave you the power to rate everyone you know from one star to five. Here’s the worst part: The Washington Post reports that you can’t delete published reviews no matter how bad, inaccurate, or biased they might be.
Given the importance of those kinds of decisions, Peeple’s “integrity features” are fairly rigorous – as Cordray will reassure you, in the most vehement terms, if you raise any concerns about shaming or bullying on the service.
The Washington Post also correctly notes that even in the hypothetical instance of positive reviews, the app is still “inherently invasive”.
The app’s Facebook claims that its mission is “to find the good in you”, and a post responding to a negative article asserts, “We are a positivity app for positive people!”
Where once you may have viewed a date or a teacher conference as a private encounter, Peeple transforms it into a radically public performance: Everything you do can be judged, publicized, recorded. Think of it as Yelp for your exes, and your neighbors.
“We feel this is the ultimate social experiment”. Not everyone wants every aspect of their life open for judgement to the internet’s watchful eye, all of the time.
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Security: Who knows? We’re merely promised that the data will be stored in a secured Mongo database in the cloud.
