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Child Safety Standards

Sivil is a communication and scheduling app for youth sports teams. A large share of the people who use it are minors, so protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation is a design requirement, not a policy afterthought. This page sets out the standards we hold ourselves to and how to reach us.

Prohibited Conduct

Child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) is prohibited on Sivil in every form. This includes, without limitation:

  • Creating, uploading, sharing, requesting, or possessing child sexual abuse material (CSAM), whether photographic, drawn, or generated.
  • Grooming: building a relationship with a minor in order to sexualize that relationship, on Sivil or elsewhere.
  • Sextortion, or any threat or coercion involving sexual content and a minor.
  • Sexualizing a minor in text, images, or video, including comments on team photos.
  • Arranging or facilitating contact with a minor for any sexual purpose, including trafficking.

Any account involved in this conduct is removed. There is no warning and no appeal for CSAM.

How Sivil Is Built to Prevent It

  • Adults and minors are not treated the same. Adult accounts must pass identity verification before they can do the things that need an adult behind them. Under-13 accounts cannot be created without verifiable parental consent, collected from the parent and not from the child.
  • Guardian oversight is built in. A guardian is alerted the first time any adult makes contact with their child, and can set an oversight level for the child's account: review messages before they are delivered, receive alerts, or see activity.
  • Every uploaded image is checked before delivery. Images are hashed and compared against known-CSAM hash sets using Microsoft PhotoDNA. A match is never delivered to anyone.
  • Messages are scanned. Text is screened for harmful content, including sexual content involving minors, before it is shown, and can be held for guardian review.
  • Public pages carry nothing that locates a child. The read-only visitor page for a team never shows addresses or location data.

Reporting Inside the App

Anyone can report a message, a user, or content on a team's visitor page from inside the app: long-press a message and choose Report, or open a profile and choose Report or Block. Reports about a child's safety are reviewed by a person. You do not need to tell the person you are reporting.

If a child is in immediate danger, contact local law enforcement first.

What Happens When CSAM Is Detected or Reported

  1. The material is quarantined immediately so it cannot be viewed or downloaded by anyone on Sivil.
  2. The account that uploaded it is suspended.
  3. A record of the incident is preserved, separately from normal user data, for as long as the law requires and for use by investigators.
  4. We report apparent CSAM to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) through its CyberTipline, as required by United States law, and cooperate with law enforcement requests that follow.
  5. Where the child is a Sivil user, their guardian is notified when it is safe to do so.

We do not keep copies of CSAM beyond what is required for the report and the preservation period. Alerts and internal records about an incident never contain the image itself.

Legal Compliance

Sivil complies with the child safety laws that apply to it, including the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the reporting obligations of 18 U.S.C. § 2258A, and with the Google Play Child Safety Standards policy. We respond to lawful requests from law enforcement and child-protection agencies.

Contact

Our designated point of contact for child safety, able to speak to our CSAM prevention practices and compliance, can be reached at accounts@sivil.us. Put Child safety in the subject line. Reports from the public, parents, and law enforcement are all welcome at this address.

See also our Safety Guidelines, Privacy Policy, and Support page.