How to complain, appeal, or reach us

1. One address for everything

support@getgassed.app — for anyone: users, parents, carers, teachers, schools and police. You do not need an account to write to us.

Schools, parents and teachers can also write to safeguarding@getgassed.app. Use it for anything about a child's safety; police should use it for first contact. Both addresses are read by the people who run gassed.

Put one of these words at the start of the subject line so we can sort it: Report, Appeal, Under 13, School, Police, My data, Complaint. If it is none of those, leave it blank and we will work it out.

Two things are quicker in the app than by email, because they land straight in the queue a moderator works from:

• Reporting content or a person — the "..." on any poll, story, message or profile, then one of eight reasons. Two taps.
• Appealing an age check — the app offers it the moment the selfie route runs out. See section 8.

[to be confirmed before launch]

2. If you use gassed

Report something. Tap the "..." on a poll, a story, a chat message or a profile, pick the reason that fits, and send. A real person reviews every report, usually within a few hours. We do not offer 24-hour cover and we do not claim to (Terms 6.4). When a person has looked at your report you get a notification that says so — it will not tell you what happened to the other person, because that would turn reporting into a way of finding out who complained.

If you pick "Self-harm or suicide" or "Harassment or bullying" the app shows you Childline, Samaritans and Papyrus HOPELINE247 straight away, and again after the report is sent. The same card is always under Settings → Get support. If someone is in immediate danger, call 999 first and report to us after.

If you pick "Child sexual abuse or exploitation" your report goes to the top of our queue. We are required by law to report that kind of content to the National Crime Agency, and we do.

Block someone from their profile or from the chat. Blocking works both ways and is enforced on our servers, not just on your screen. Settings → Blocked people lists and undoes it.

Stop being put in polls: Settings → Polls about you → "Don't include me in polls". Immediate.

See or take your data: Settings → Download my data. A JSON file with everything we hold, straight away, up to three times an hour.

Delete your account: Settings → Delete account. Immediate, no email to send, no waiting period. What survives is set out in the Privacy Notice (row 3 and Part 5): the scrambled record of your age checks, the date of a ban if there was one, and our moderation records.

Anything else — a decision you disagree with, something we got wrong, something that is not covered by a button — email support@getgassed.app. Section 8 covers appeals specifically.

3. If you do not use gassed — parents, carers, teachers, schools

You do not need an account to raise something with us. Email safeguarding@getgassed.app and tell us:

• what you are worried about, in your own words;
• the school, if you know it;
• the name the person uses on gassed, if you know it (real names are shown on chat, stories and polls, so the child will usually know it);
• roughly when it happened;
• how we can reach you.

What we can do. Look at the content, remove it if it breaks our rules (Terms section 5), and apply the same warning-limit-ban ladder we apply to anything a user reports (Terms 6.6). We treat an emailed report like an in-app one once we have read it.

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. The ICO's position is that a child who can understand their own rights exercises them themselves, and the age at which we assume that is 13.

How fast. An email is not in the moderation queue; it is read when someone checks the inbox. [to be confirmed before launch]

Schools. See section 5.

Police. See section 6.

4. Reporting an account you think belongs to someone under 13

gassed is for people aged 13 and over. The app asks for a date of birth and then checks it with a selfie age estimate before an account can exist, and it locks the birthday so it cannot be changed afterwards (Terms 2.1, 3.3). That catches most attempts. It does not catch a child who used someone else's date of birth and passed the estimate, or who used a sibling's phone.

If you think an account belongs to a child under 13, email safeguarding@getgassed.app with Under 13 in the subject and tell us the name shown in the app and the school. We will:

1. Look at the account's recorded date of birth and age-check result.
2. If the account belongs to someone under 13, close it. Terms 2.1 says we will, and we do not need the child's or a parent's agreement to do it.
3. Tell you we have received the report and that it has been acted on. We will not tell you what the account contained.

5. Schools

We are not the school's education provider and the school is not our customer. Pupils sign up themselves, from 13, and the school is a label they pick from a directory built from public registers. That shapes what we can and cannot do for a school.

"Take our school's name out of the app." We can stop a school being searchable so that nobody new can pick it: the school is marked closed in our directory — the same thing we do for a school that has genuinely shut — which leaves existing accounts pointing at it rather than deleting the entry their profiles depend on. Pupils who already have accounts keep them. We will not delete pupils' accounts on a school's request: they are our users, they agreed to the Terms themselves, and the school is not their guardian.

"Pause polls about our 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 (a moderator takedown, one poll at a time) and stop new sign-ups as above. [to be confirmed before launch]

"Give us what a pupil posted." No, unless one of the routes in section 6 applies or the pupil asks for it themselves (Settings → Download my data). A school's safeguarding duty does not by itself give it a right to a child's private messages held by a third party. If a school's designated safeguarding lead tells us a specific child is at risk, we will act on the content ourselves and, where a child is in danger, call the police, not hand the school the data.

"A teacher has been named in a poll." Poll subjects 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 will treat it as a false sign-up.

There is a short page for parents, teachers and schools at getgassed.app/safety: what the app is, what it deliberately does not do, and this contact route.

6. Law enforcement and court orders

First contact for police and any other law-enforcement agency is safeguarding@getgassed.app, with Police at the start of the subject line. There is no separate portal; at our size an inbox that a person reads is the route.

[to be confirmed before launch]

What we hold that a request could reach: the phone number an account signed up with, date of birth, display name, school, year and form, survey answers, votes (stored with the voter's account — see Privacy Notice note G), likes, polls created, chat messages and story captions, moderation logs (a 200-character excerpt of each piece of screened text with the AI's verdict), reports filed, and enforcement state. We do not hold photos of anyone, location history, or IP addresses for signed-in activity; the only IP addresses we keep are in a rate-limit counter for school searches made before sign-up, purged after two days.

What we need before we disclose.

• The requesting force or agency, a named officer, a contactable official address, and a reference.
• The legal basis. A court order or production order we must comply with; or a written request under a statutory power. A request that cites the crime exemption in the Data Protection Act 2018 (Schedule 2, Part 1, paragraph 2) permits us to disclose without breaching UK GDPR — it does not compel us — so we still decide whether disclosure is necessary and proportionate for the purpose stated.
• Precisely which account, which data, and for what period. We do not answer "everything about this school".

Emergencies. Where an officer tells us there is an immediate risk to someone's life or safety, we can disclose what is needed to deal with that risk without waiting for paperwork, and we will ask for the paperwork afterwards.

Telling the user. [to be confirmed before launch]

Child sexual exploitation and abuse. We do not wait to be asked. Detected CSEA content is reported to the National Crime Agency under section 66 of the Online Safety Act 2023, and the content and account are preserved rather than deleted. We have a written internal procedure for this.

7. What happens to a complaint

• In-app reports are recorded and appear in the moderator queue with the reason, the content, its author and your name as reporter (moderators see who reported; nobody else does). Reports about self-harm or suicide and about child sexual abuse are floated to the top and labelled URGENT. Every decision — uphold, no violation, content removed, held message released — is written to a log that cannot be edited. The report and the decision are kept for 24 months, longer while a report is still open or under a legal hold; the Privacy Notice (note P) says the same.
• Emailed complaints — [to be confirmed before launch]
• Who decides. One of the two people who run gassed. For an appeal against a decision one of us made, the other one of us looks at it (section 8).
• What we will tell you. That we received it, that a person has looked at it, and what we did about your content or your account. We will not tell you what we did to someone else's account.

Response times we already promise, and will not promise faster than:

8. Appeals

You can appeal any decision we make about you. Here is each one, how it is appealed, and who decides.

Reporting and blocking are never taken away, even from a banned account (Terms 6.8). You can report someone while you are appealing your own sanction.

9. Complaints we will not investigate in full — "manifestly unfounded"

Ofcom's Codes let a service decide not to fully investigate a complaint that is manifestly unfounded (PCU D13), provided it says what that means and records it. Here is what it means for us.

A complaint is manifestly unfounded when it is obvious on its face, without investigation, that there is nothing to decide. In practice:

• it repeats a complaint the same person has already made about the same content or decision, with nothing new;
• it names no content, no account and no decision, and does not answer when asked;
• it is plainly made to harass another user or to overload the queue — for example, the same account reporting every message a classmate sends;
• it asks for something we do not do and have said we do not do (naming who voted; removing a positive poll because the complainant was not chosen).

What we do with one: it is still recorded, with the reason it was classed this way; it is closed without a full review; and the person is told, once, that it was received and why it will not be investigated further. If they add something new, it is a new complaint.

What we do not do: penalise someone for an honest report that turns out to be wrong (a wrong report is not a false one); take the report or block buttons away from anyone (Terms 6.8); or classify a report about self-harm, suicide or child sexual abuse as unfounded without a person opening it first — those are always opened, because the cost of being wrong is not symmetrical.

10. If you are still not happy

• About your personal data: the Information Commissioner's Office. Free. [to be confirmed before launch]
• About online safety: Ofcom regulates services like ours under the Online Safety Act. Ofcom does not resolve individual complaints, but it does want to hear about services that are not meeting their duties, and you can tell it. [to be confirmed before launch]
• About a purchase: Apple handles refunds for anything bought through the App Store (Terms section 10). If you are under 18, tell us too and we will help (Terms section 11).