Child Safety Standards.

Child sexual abuse and exploitation are forbidden on Murmur, in any form. That includes:

• Child sexual abuse material: any image, video or other content that shows the sexual abuse of a child or sexualizes a child, whether it’s real, edited, drawn or made with AI.
• Grooming: contacting a child to gain their trust for sexual purposes.
• Sextortion: demanding sexual images from a young person, or threatening to share them.
• Asking a minor for sexual images, or sending sexual content to a minor.
• Sexualizing minors anywhere in Murmur, including in usernames, profile photos, bios and group names.
• Trafficking or sexually exploiting children, or advertising it.
• Pointing to this material elsewhere, for example by sharing links to it or offering it.

Here, a child or a minor is anyone under 18. These standards apply to every account, every chat and group, every profile and username, every link and every imported chat. They come with our rules and our Terms of Service, and change only the way our terms do.

• When you create your account, you confirm you’re 16 or older. We never ask for your date of birth.
• Where an app store tells apps the age range of the person using them, Murmur uses it on your device to apply this rule, and doesn’t keep it.
• If we learn that someone under 16 is using Murmur, we close the account.
• If you’re a parent or guardian and you think your child under 16 has a Murmur account, write to safety@murmur.free with the username. Our team looks into it, and closes the account only if it finds that it belongs to someone under 16. A message on its own is never enough, so nobody can close someone else’s account just by writing to us.
• Being 16 or older never makes it acceptable to sexualize anyone under 18.

Murmur is made for private chats with people you know. Its defaults make it hard for a stranger to reach a young person:

• No public directory, no public channels and no “people nearby”.
• Only your exact username finds you, number included. Anyone who types it exactly can find you and send a request. It’s on by default, and you can turn it off in Settings › Privacy › Find Me by Username.
• You choose who can write to you first, whether everyone, only people you share a group with, or nobody but the people you added (Settings › Privacy › Allow Requests From).
• A stranger’s first message waits in Message Requests. Until you accept, they can send 3 messages at most, links show no preview, their photos stay hidden until you tap them, and they see no sign that you read their message, that you’re typing or that you’re online. A request from an account made less than a week ago comes with a warning.
• Nobody adds you to a group without your consent. Your contacts can add you directly; when anyone else adds you, the group arrives as a request, which you can accept or delete.
• Only the people you chat with see when you’re online, never strangers or requests. You can keep it to your contacts, or turn it off.
• Your profile photo and bio show only to your contacts by default.
• Groups above 200 members ask for approval by default.
• Photos lose their location before they’re sent.
• You can block anyone, in one step.

• We can’t see what people send. Messages, voice messages, photos and files are end-to-end encrypted on people’s devices. Our servers pass them along without a key to open them.
• We don’t scan private messages, on our servers or on your device. It’s on our list of things we will never build.
• So reports matter. When you report, the messages you choose come to our team with their original signatures, so we can check who really sent them. Signed messages can’t be denied.
• We act on the account. We can close it and remove its devices without seeing anything else, and we act as soon as we know.

In the app:

1. 1

   Report the message, the person or the group.

2. 2

   Choose “Child safety”.

3. 3

   Choose the messages to include, up to 10.

4. 4

   In a group, make sure Murmur’s safety team gets the report. You can send it to the group’s admins too.

You can block the person as well.

Without the app. Write to safety@murmur.free. Tell us what you saw and where, such as a username or a group link. Never attach the images. You can also report it directly to the reporting hotline where you live, and INHOPE lists them.

• We review it within 24 hours, every day of the week.
• If the report is confirmed, we close the account and remove its devices, without alerting the person, so we don’t warn someone who may be under investigation.
• We report it. We report to the bodies the law requires, such as the CyberTipline of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), with the data we actually hold.
• We keep the evidence, and only what the law requires. The report, the related encrypted data and the records of the account and its devices go into a locked vault, for 1 year, as the law requires, and longer only while a legal order requires it. Only two people on our team, together, can open it, and every opening is logged. Then it’s destroyed.
• We never put reports or evidence into an AI tool, and we give them to no one other than the authorities above.
• We record the case, and count it in our transparency report.

Because of the investigation, we may not be able to tell you what happened next.

What we can give the authorities is only what we hold about the account, such as its username, the day it was created, its devices and the messages that were reported. We keep no IP addresses, and we can’t open any other message. The full list is in our law enforcement guidelines.

We report on our own, as the law requires, so authorities don’t need to ask. Police and other authorities can write to legal@murmur.free, including for emergencies. How we answer them is in our law enforcement guidelines.

• Immediate danger: call your local emergency number.
• To report the sexual exploitation of a child online: INHOPE (inhope.org) lists the reporting hotline where you live.
• Sexual images taken of you before you turned 18: Take It Down (takeitdown.ncmec.org) helps remove them from the online services that take part.

Murmur Labs LLC has a designated child safety contact, who is responsible for these standards and can speak about how we apply them. Write to safety@murmur.free, in English or in French.