Anti-Social ‘Peeple’ Rating App

It sounded like a bad idea from the start.

We already have Yelp to rate restaurants, RateMyProfessor to track college teachers, and Fandango for ranking movies we’ve just seen.

Even the dating app Tinder allows users to tap a heart indicating we want to meet the person in the (likely altered) picture, or swipe to never see them on our device again.

It’s no surprise that we’re living in a quantified world. So why not just rate people you know in life, regardless of your relationship with them? What could possibly go wrong?

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Enter Peeple, an as-yet unreleased app developed by entrepreneur Julia Cordray. She told the Washington Post in an interview that the app lets you “leave 1-5 star reviews of the people in your life.” The Peeple’s website FAQ told the real story, however, when it detailed that there would be no way to remove your entry once someone had rated you, and no way to erase negative comments or reviews.

She even described Peeple as “Yelp for People.” Except that even a modicum of homework would have revealed that Yelp itself has been under constant assault from businesses and consumer-protection organizations for ethics violations and shady business practices. Some Yelp users are finding themselves in legal trouble for their digital opinions.

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Could Peeple inspire similar lawsuits? The app already sparked a Change.org petition. So far, nearly 8,000 people have asked prominent app stores run by Apple and Google not to work with the product.

What Peeple most seems like is a 21st century extortion racket where for $50 you’d be able to remove negative reviews and for $100 you could have your profile blocked permanently. And where have we heard about this before? The “life is short, have an affair” site Ashley Madison, infamous for its recent data breach, offered users the ability to permanently delete their account once they’d had second thoughts. For $20. And then, with some irony, didn’t actually delete the accounts at all, as millions of people learned the hard way.

It still seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

The potential user ratings for Peeple were consistent and straightforward, though, and all quite negative. In fact, it’s a horrible idea for an application that would just add fuel to the hateful, anonymous, negative fire that already plagues the online world.

Cordray and her team have stepped back from the fray, too, with the website forthepeeple.com indicating that something positive is coming. Cordray said on LinkedIn that Peeple “has always been a positivity app” and that “there is no way to even make negative comments” in it. Meanwhile, there’s no release date, and the app still seems like a disaster waiting to happen.

Maybe the best way to deal with it is the same way you learned to deal with the mean kids in grade school: Just ignore them.