Character is destiny — the tagline does all the talking for the just released people rating app Peeple. An unwelcome guest for the users, the app kicked up controversies, made an unceremonious entry via newsy tidbits in the social media towards the fag end of 2015 and disappeared in silence. Following the backlash, many thought the offending app had gone up in smoke but it returned stronger than ever, breaking all assumptions. It sure holds enough room to evoke fear for it is fondly referred to as a ‘Yelp for Humans’.
The app gives the user the liberty to rate and review another person, anybody of their choice and grade them under personal, professional and dating heads. The reason to press the panic button is clear —that it seeks no permission from the person who is being rated. And nothing can spell doom than negative rating that may go to the extent of cyber-bullying to textual abuse. For example, Washington Post welcomed Peeple in 2015 saying “Everyone you know will be able to rate you on the terrifying ‘Yelp for people’— whether you want them to or not.”
Many question the logic behind evaluating human beings, rating them just like a hotel, pub, multiplex or a food joint. Here the service providers justify that “The Peeple app allows you to better choose who you hire, do business with, date, become your neighbours, roommates, landlords/tenants, and watch, teach, and care for your children,” raising one’s reputation over social media. A user can write review of non participants and there is an advantage of it not getting published, but would get stored in the trove of company’s servers. Yet how practically this facility could function in future raises serious concerns.
From the terms and conditions of Peeple, Techcrunch brings out this extract: “Once Content is published it may not be able to be removed...you hereby irrevocably grant to Peeple the continuous, non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use your Content for any purpose whatsoever and in any format. These rights shall be assignable, transferable, and licensable by Peeple.”
To get into the app, the user needs to sign-up via Facebook and create a Peeple account. To douse fears, the company offers to hold the negative ratings for 48 hours to get approval whereas the positive feedback go live instantly. Whatever is said and done, within two days of release Peeple was the top trending app on the App Store and it still toils hard on Facebook to allay fears of its subscribers.
