For parents, teachers and schools

What gassed is

gassed is an iPhone app for pupils and students at UK secondary schools, sixth forms, colleges and universities. You must be 13 or over and sign up with a UK mobile number.

A poll is a question about people at your school. The question is always a compliment — “Has the best laugh”, “Actually shows up when it matters” — and the options are classmates on the same school roll. Votes are anonymous: nobody using the app is shown who voted for whom.

Real names are shown everywhere else: on the options in a poll, in chat, in stories and in friend lists. The only place a pseudonym appears is on a vote, where each person has a random “voting handle” such as “Velvet Comet” that they can change at any time.

The app also has chat between classmates (one-to-one, and groups of up to 50 people), text-only “stories” that disappear after 24 hours, and friend requests. Chat is not anonymous.

gassed is run by two people, who are also its moderators and who read every report.

What the app cannot do

• Nobody can write their own poll question. Every poll uses one of 40 pre-written prompts, all of them compliments. There is also a “custom” poll, which is one of six fixed sentence frames (“Deserves an award for ___”) with a single blank of up to 40 characters. The finished sentence is checked on our server before the poll exists and is refused unless the check comes back as clearly fine.
• No prompt ranks anyone on how they look, and none is negative. Three prompts that touched on appearance were removed from the list.
• No photos. There are no profile pictures and no way to upload an image anywhere in the app. Avatars are drawn from initials. Stories are text only.
• Nobody in the app is shown who voted for whom — not the winner, not the person who made the poll, not friends. App users cannot read the voter column in the database at all; votes are served as counts. We, the people who run gassed, can see it in the database, and a lawful police or court request could reach it. We say so plainly in the Privacy Notice.
• A paid hint is one clue about one voter. Someone who wins a poll can get one clue about one person who voted for them: that voter’s year, subject, gender or first initial — and only if at least five people at the school share it. One clue per win, ever; clues cannot be stacked. A hint never gives a name, a photo or a contact detail.
• Polls can only name people at the same school. The picker only shows classmates on the same roll.
• Anyone can opt out of being in polls. By default a pupil can be included in polls by classmates. Settings → Polls about you → “Don’t include me in polls” turns that off immediately, and it is enforced when a poll is created, not just hidden on screen.
• No location tracking, no advertising, no analytics software. Location is used only if a pupil taps “Schools near me” while searching for their school, for that one search, and it is not stored. Contacts stay on the phone: the invite screen reads them so a pupil can pick who to text, and the text is sent from their own Messages app. Crash reporting can be switched on; when it is, query strings, cookies and headers are stripped and the only thing about the user attached is their account id.
• Everything typed in free text is checked before anyone else sees it — see below.

The age check

Before an account exists, a person types their date of birth on a screen that does not say what age it is looking for, and then takes one selfie in the app’s own camera. The selfie is sent to Didit, an age-estimation company, with storage switched off; it is turned into pass or fail and a broad age band, and it is not kept by us or by Didit. Nobody at gassed sees it.

• The minimum age is 13. A school roll takes 13- to 19-year-olds whose selfie did not read as clearly adult; a university takes 16 and over. Both rules are enforced in the database when the profile is created.
• Two failed scans (or three that did not work at all) close the selfie route. The person can then send a photo of a document showing their date of birth to a moderator, who decides — usually within 24 hours. The photo is deleted the moment a decision is made, and within seven days whatever happens. Two appeals per phone number.
• The birthday is fixed by the first real result, and the scan and appeal limits are tied to the phone number, so deleting the account and signing up again does not reset them.

What this does not catch: a child who typed someone else’s date of birth and passed the estimate, or who used an older sibling’s phone. If you think an account belongs to someone under 13, tell us.

Reporting and blocking

• Report in two taps. The “…” on any poll, story, chat message or profile, then one of eight reasons: Harassment or bullying · Self-harm or suicide · Threats or violence · Sexual content · Child sexual abuse or exploitation · Hate speech · Impersonation · Something else.
• A real person reviews every report, usually within a few hours. We do not offer 24-hour cover and we do not claim to.
• Reports about self-harm or suicide, and about child sexual abuse, go to the top of the queue and are marked urgent.
• Picking “Self-harm or suicide” or “Harassment or bullying” shows Childline, Samaritans and Papyrus straight away, and again after the report is sent. The same card is always under Settings → Get support.
• Blocking works both ways and is enforced on our servers. Block someone from their profile or from the chat; neither of you can message the other or put the other in a poll, and you disappear from each other’s feed, stories and classmate picker.
• Reporting and blocking are never taken away, even from an account that has been banned.

You do not need an account to raise something with us — see below.

What is checked before anyone sees it

Every chat message, story caption, group chat name and custom-poll blank is sent to an automated check on our server before anyone else can see it. The check is a Google Gemini model with strict instructions written for an app used by 13-year-olds; it returns one of three answers.

• Allowed — delivered.
• Held — a chat message that is held goes to a person before it is delivered, and the sender is told it is under review. A story caption, a group name or a custom-poll blank that is not clearly fine is refused outright rather than held.
• Blocked — never delivered. The sender sees a short message.

If the check cannot run — an outage, a timeout — nothing goes through. A display name is checked as well, though that check runs on the phone rather than on our server.

An automated check makes mistakes in both directions. A person reviews everything it holds, and anything it lets through can be reported. A message it blocks is never stored, so it cannot be “released”; the sender can email us and a person will look at whether the block was wrong (Support, section 8).

The people who moderate, and what happens to rule-breakers

Moderators are a fixed list in our database — the two people who run gassed. Every action a moderator takes is written to a log that cannot be edited.

Only decisions a moderator has upheld count against someone. Being reported does not count, and neither does a message that was held and then released. Over a rolling 180 days:

Serious content can be removed and an account closed straight away, without going through the ladder (Terms, section 6). Content that sexualises a child is reported to the National Crime Agency, and the content and account are preserved rather than deleted.

What a school or parent can ask us for

Email: safeguarding@getgassed.app — put School, Under 13, Report or Police at the start of the subject line. (support@getgassed.app reaches the same people.) You do not need an account. Tell us what you are worried about in your own words, the school, the name the person uses on gassed if you know it (real names are shown, so a pupil will usually know it), roughly when it happened, and how we can reach you.

• Take down a specific poll, story, message or account. Report it in the app or email us. If it breaks our rules we remove it, and the same warning–limit–ban ladder applies as for anything a user reports.
• Stop new sign-ups for your school. Our school list is built from the public registers (GIAS and the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish equivalents). We can mark your school closed in that list so nobody new can pick it. Pupils who already have accounts keep them.
• Pause polls about your pupils. There is no school-wide switch in the app today. Each pupil has one — Settings → Polls about you — and it takes effect immediately. What we can do by hand is close every open poll at the school, one poll at a time, and stop new sign-ups as above. That is manual and partial, and we would rather say so.
• Report an account you think belongs to someone under 13. Tell us the name shown in the app and the school. We look at the account’s recorded date of birth and age-check result, close it if it belongs to someone under 13, and tell you it has been acted on. We will not tell you what the account contained.
• A teacher has been named in a poll. Poll options are chosen from the pupil roll at the same school, so a teacher can only appear if they signed up as a pupil. Report it under School and we treat it as a false sign-up.

What we cannot do: show you another person’s messages, votes or account details, or confirm whether a named person has an account. That is their data, and in most cases they are a child. We also do not delete a pupil’s account at a school’s request; any pupil can delete their own account instantly in Settings, with no email to send and no waiting period.

Police and court orders: see Support, section 6. Complaints and appeals: Support.

If a child needs help now

These are the same organisations the app shows. If someone is in immediate danger, call 999.