“Imagine you’re about to go on a first date. You Yelp the restaurant, naturally, to make sure that it has something edible on the menu; then you Google the person, naturally, to make sure that they’re not obnoxious on social media,” Mary Sollosi reports for EW. “Simple enough!”
“In a (perhaps inevitable) new development, these two perfectly innocuous Internet searches are coming together in Peeple, an app that will allow users to rate and search other human beings,” Sollosi reports. “It’s Yelp for people, and it’s coming in November.”
“Users will be able to review their friends, coworkers, and romantic partners — who may or may not have ever signed on to the app themselves — using a one- to five-star rating scale,” Sollosi reports. “In order to rate somebody, you need to join the app through Facebook using your real name, and you must be at least 21 years old. To review somebody else who is not on the app, you can create a profile for them with their cell phone number; they will be notified via text that they have been added to Peeple, but they won’t have an option to remove their profile from the app.”
“If you are not on Peeple yourself but others are rating you, then only positive reviews will be posted,” Sollosi reports. “If you have, in fact, registered, then negative reviews will be published, but only after 48 hours of being written so that you will have a chance to dispute them.”
Read more in the full article here.
“The most surprising thing about Peeple — basically Yelp, but for humans — may be the fact that no one has yet had the gall to launch something like it,” Caitlin Dewey reports for The Washington Post. “You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose. ‘People do so much research when they buy a car or make those kinds of decisions,’ said Julia Cordray, one of the app’s founders. ‘Why not do the same kind of research on other aspects of your life?'”
“A bubbly, no-holds-barred ‘trendy lady’ with a marketing degree and two recruiting companies, Cordray sees no reason you wouldn’t want to ‘showcase your character’ online,” Dewey reports. “Co-founder Nicole McCullough comes at the app from a different angle: As a mother of two in an era when people don’t always know their neighbors, she wanted something to help her decide whom to trust with her kids. ‘As two empathetic, female entrepreneurs in the tech space, we want to spread love and positivity,’ Cordray stressed. ‘We want to operate with thoughtfulness.’ Unfortunately for the millions of people who could soon find themselves the unwilling subjects — make that objects — of Cordray’s app, her thoughts do not appear to have shed light on certain very critical issues, such as consent and bias and accuracy and the fundamental wrongness of assigning a number value to a person.”
“It’s inherently invasive, even when complimentary. And it’s objectifying and reductive in the manner of all online reviews. One does not have to stretch far to imagine the distress and anxiety that such a system would cause even a slightly self-conscious person; it’s not merely the anxiety of being harassed or maligned on the platform — but of being watched and judged, at all times, by an objectifying gaze to which you did not consent,” Dewey reports. “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. ‘That’s feedback for you!’ Cordray enthuses. ‘You can really use it to your advantage.'”
Much more in the full article here.
“The CEO of the new app called Peeple, a ‘Yelp for humans,’ is defending her new product after critics called it ‘irresponsible’ and ‘the third circle of hell,'” Andrew Ramos reports for WPIX. “According to the app’s founders Julia Cordray and Nicole McCullough, the app was created to ‘find the good’ in people and not as a cyber bullying tool.”
“Reviews are based on a 5-star rating. Negative reviews, a rating of two stars or less, are not immediately published,” Ramos reports. “The reviewer and reviewee get 48 hours to hash it out. If they can’t come to an understanding, the negative review gets published. The reviewee then gets the opportunity to defend themselves on the app.”
Critics slammed Peeple,” Ramos reports. “The response was so aggressive, the company’s CEO attempted to shut off the comments section of their Facebook page — an attempt that was met with irony. One critic tweeted, ‘founder of #peeple, an app designed to collect unsolicited feedback doesn’t appear to like unsolicited feedback.'”
With any new concept there is naturally fear. When the people found out that the earth was round instead of flat and that we revolved around the sun instead of the sun revolving around us naturally people were upset and confused and they pushed back with all that they had. Bringing a new idea to market when people don’t believe that the world is genuinely a good place filled with amazing people there will be push back and fear. We look forward to proving that the people in this world are genuinely good and positive and they will uplift you on our app with over 80 percent positivity. — Peeple CEO Julia Cordray
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: These two ditzes are about to get much-needed wakeup calls. As if Facebook isn’t bad enough!
Imagine being forced to “hash it out” over 48 hours with some asshole you were unfortunate enough to cross paths with in the distant past – unbidden! Let the lawsuits over lost time, invasion of privacy, etc., etc., etc. fly until the whole thing implodes.
Apple should not approve this app for App Store inclusion.
Lol I thought this was a joke.
This is one of those Catch-22 situations. I people always acted in the manner expected by the developers, i.e. always told the truth, never got their facts wrong etc., you wouldn’t need the app. This is the most useless idea ever.
They should have called it “Defacebook”.
The petition is here: https://www.change.org/p/apple-google-inc-ban-the-launch-of-the-peeple-application
Even Julia doesn’t want people posting public information about her on her own Facebook page that promotes an app that does this exact same thing!!!
Or tell her yourself:
Julia Cordray, Career Fox Inc.
217 Toscana Gardens NW
Calgary, AB. T3L 3C3
Canada
(403) 697-2824
julia@mycareerfox.com
The plague of liberalism spreads at the cost of common sense and decency…..
I think you mean “capitalism”. There’s nothing “liberal” about this idea. They want to make money, which tends to be bipartisan.
If it appeals to any political ideology, it would be libertarianism. It’s everyone for himself or herself, and screw the public good. But I can’t imagine even a libertarian being thrilled with this.
I agree with MacDailyNews. Talk about an invasion of privacy. The whole thing is built on the assumption that people tell the truth. That is NOT true. Every person lives in their own reality and sees the whole, AND people differently than any there person. Their opinion of a person is subjective and those there can be no objectivity throughout this apps reviews. This is a disaster waiting to happen and I hope the law suits put not only the company under, but the dimwits that thought it up under as well! Morons!
Complete agree with you webstyr. All people have their personal view of the world, and it may or may not jive with anyone else. This is idiotic. Apple should remove it from app store.
Though I agree with your sentiment, censorship is not the answer. Suing the crap out of them is. I’m not a lawyer, but I can see a huge class action case made out of this.
This is an invasion of privacy and could be dangerous.
For instance, a very good friend of mine works with mentally disturbed people and has a very distinctive and unusual surname. Her clients can be violent and have been known to harbour grudges against people that try to help them. She has made sure that she has no presence on Facebook and is pretty well invisible on-line because she could be endangered if her clients could find out where she lives. She doesn’t generally talk about her work, so her neighbours might have no idea that she has good reasons to keep a low profile.
As it happens, she lives in a village of about 200 people – I’ll call it Quietville. If one of her neighbours ‘reviewed’ her on Peeple and said nice things about her, but also said that she was the loveliest person in Quietville, anybody who wanted to find her could link her name to that village and find her very easily.
Similar concerns could be raised about women who walk out of violent marriages and move far away so that their ex-husbands can’t find them any more. It could be catastrophic if a friend or neighbour unintentionally revealed information about them.
Allowing people to reveal too much information about themselves is one thing, but allowing people to reveal things about other people is totally wrong, unnecessary and potentially dangerous.
Lawyers will love all the libel cases about to begin.
It will work out about as as Yelp does, mostly just decent people being crucified.
To paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm: “Those Peeple developers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
This is the problem with society as a whole from about the ’40’s onward.
As if kids didn’t have enough ways to social shame each other ;(
If I caught someone posting my name and number…id go nuclear on their ass fo sho
Wow, an app to rate people is a new concept? Not at at all we do it all the time, perhaps not on a quantitative level but certainly on a qualitative level. Going to be fun to see people arguing about which fruit is more red, a strawberry or a raspberry.
Interesting quote by Julia Cordray. I’ll be happy to trash and reassemble.
“With any new concept there is naturally fear.”
– Actually Julia, it’s a a learned concept. Give a child something and they’ll go for it. Heck they don’t even need to be given something, they’ll crawl for it.
“When the people found out that the earth was round instead of flat”
– Whoa whoa whoa Julia, get with the times. Pizza is round the earth, it’s more like spherical. I tell you folks she sounds like a two dimensional thinker.
“When the people found out that the earth was round instead of flat and that we revolved around the sun instead of the sun revolving around us naturally people were upset and confused and they pushed back with all that they had.”
Not all people were upset, take note of those that pushed back, religious oppressors. Just like the ones around today providing so much of the evening news.
Julia, seriously I think your product will be fantastic but frankly I think a lot of it will consider it more aptly named Poophole. Just a thought.
Should I include the /shjtt tag to illustrate satire, humor, joke, tall tale. I better otherwise some folks might take me seriously and that will be a new concept to them and they will come to fear me, according to Julia, who that the world is like a round pizza instead of a spherical orange….or Apple.
It’s funny isn’t it, the wars that broke out over whether the earth was flat or round? (Crickets…) Shouldn’t we all read the hadith and get educated? The sun really sets in a pool of water every day!
Yup, this silent war has been going on for a long time a lot longer than the flat round debate, but as science has expanded and stabilized, the general gods and deities have found themselves abandoned by the wayside until only one group of gods remains, the gods of death. If science ever figures out that natural phenomenon you know that last brigade will melt like a snowflake on a hot griddle.
The round earth/sun thing was a stupid and irrelevant analogy. A desperate attempt to align herself with the enlightened crowd.
All I can say is WOW. Guess that shooter in Oregon or the Sandy Hook shooter represent those great people who would be lifted up. Seems like they would just go off sooner.
Utter nonsense.
Dumbest idea ever and yes in this case censorship is the answer for the greater good. Just like gun control. (Here comes the one stars, lmao.)
May your last words be an ode to gun control when the criminal invades your apartment and puts his gun to your head. You, defenseless hero, followed the rules in your city. Let all good citizens be disarmed! Strange how evil doesn’t follow the rules good people set down.
Of course, you probably also think that inanimate objects make people do things. Clearly, the computer typed your words, not you. Oh? You mean you controlled the computer, the laptop, the tablet, or the phone? Likewise, people can control guns.
I won’t hijack the thread. Perhaps a good use for yelp’s new software is rate people whether they’re stable enough to own a gun. Things like acting like a paramilitary wingnut when you aren’t one comes to mind.
The whole thing seems silly. Like a reality show times a billion. If someone leaves a negative review, the affected person will then leave a negative review, and so on. It’s just going to end up being a bunch of publicized arguments. With the added bonus of any positive “reviews” being deemed fake.
The Tweet regarding the Facebook comments is absolutely hilarious.
The MDN take is spot on.
After the inevitable slander suits, this entrepreneur will have to borrow money to pay for his pizza delivery car.
Yelp is bad enough. They remove posts that are made that don’t make the business look good. Yet I thought Yelp was to rate the business on how they perform? Yet if you give them a bad rating Yelp removes it. So when you go through yelp and see all positive reviews now you know why. The business just complains to Yelp and Yelp removes it no matter what the truth really is. There website is not worth even a thought anymore since they don’t really let the consumer rate it like it is.
Personally I’d take great delight in obtaining the minimum possible grade on such a stupid POS. I hope it dies a death pretty quickly.
This will hurt the Narcissist of the world. I can see the flame wars happening between these group of idiots on Yelp. 😛
The defence…
“the app was created to ‘find the good’ in people and not as a cyber bullying tool.”
Oh yeh… just like already happens on the Web. The Internet wasn’t CREATED as a cyber bullying tool either, you abject moron.
I read some of the comments on their Facebook page yesterday. They got blew up. And as fast as they deleted commentary it was adding up five times faster. If you want a really hilarious read, go to their website and read their self-serving “ode to courage”
Yup,
Don’t do it Apple. You banned the C flag. You should ban this.
So, if you don’t ever log into the app, It will only display the positive ratings submitted on your behalf?
That also raises a legal flag…. say a woman checks out a new first date and all ratings are positive, so she unwittingly goes out to dinner with a serial killer … see what I mean?
“She fucks like a dead fish and her vag smells like a bear’s ass. Plus she loves to spend your money ALL DAY LONG.”
“His penis is the size of a Lima bean and he wears the same underwear for days. He can’t hold a job for more than a few months, and needs to be ‘with the boyzz’ at least twice a week. Watch out, he gets rough when he is on one of his coke binges.”
Yelp will probably extort money from people just like some of the iOS ad blockers extort money from advertisers.
If you hate hubris in people who go out of their way to create discord, such as the creators of Peeple, you might be interested in this… https://www.change.org/p/apple-google-inc-ban-the-launch-of-the-peeple-application