Parents Guide

At Catchups, we understand as parents, your childs online safety is an important part of their digital lives. With the rate of children using smartphones and tablets increasing exponentially, we believe it is important to be able to provide parents with a guide to their child’s online safety when using Catchups.

Below, we have put together some tips for you and your kids.

Minimum Age

The minimum age to use Catchups is 13 years of age. Please note this may be higher in other jurisdictions. 

If your child is under the age of 13 and is a user of Catchups, you can do one of the following.

1)   Delete their account (Go to settings and then Delete account).

2)   Contact Us here.

Personal Information

Always remind your kids to be careful about what identifiable information they share with others. Identifiable information can include a phone number, home address, personal financial information, parent’s financial information, medical information, school information etc. Kids should be made aware that this type of information should NEVER be shared to others online.

Explicit Images & Videos

Catchups’ community guidelines strictly state that the distribution of sexually explicit content in the form of images, videos and messages are prohibited. Children should be made aware that distributing forms of sexually explicit content to anyone under the age of 18 can be a serious crime. For more information, please refer to our Community Guidelines.

Screenshotting

It is important to educate your kids on the concept of screenshotting. Kids should be made aware that anything you send in the form of images, videos and messages can be screenshotted by the other person and used in a harmful manner. This can lead to a number of legal and psychological issues. It is important to remind kids to never send any content that implies an illegal act, content that could cause forms of embarrassment and/or content that could serve serious repercussions from school, friends or family.

Protect Passwords

Make sure your kids have a unique and strong password that they do not share with anyone. The password limit is set to a default of 6 characters, but for added security, we recommend a password limit of 10 characters. Be sure to add a mix of numbers, capital/lowercase letters and special characters (eg. !@#$%^&*) to increase your password strength. Parents should remind kids to use a password that does not contain their name, username, birthday, phone number, bank details or any other personal information.

Real Friends vs Online Friends

Catchups is designed for you to chat and enjoy communications with your friends but there is a possibility of interacting with people you don’t know. Parents should always keep an eye on who their kids are talking to and sure to remove chats in Catchup Requests or their Home Screen of people who are not real friends. Parents should continually enforce the importance of online safety and NEVER to meet up with anyone they don’t know.

Harassment & Bullying

At Catchups, we take harassment and bullying extremely seriously. We have a zero-tolerance policy on harassment and bullying. Due to the increasing awareness of cyberbullying, parents should continuously be educating their kids on why bullying is wrong and what consequences bullying may have.

Need to know something specific?

We are always here to help. If you have a specific question regarding your child’s safety, feel free to contact us.