Child Safety Standards

Driftbottle is a location-based app where people drop and find virtual "message bottles" — voice recordings, text messages and pictures — at real places. These are Driftbottle's standards against child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE). They apply to everything on Driftbottle: recordings, text messages, labels, bottle names, bottler names and social links.

Who can use Driftbottle

You must be 13 or older to use Driftbottle. Children under 13 aren't allowed: sign-up asks for the month and year you were born and doesn't let anyone younger than 13 create an account, and we delete any account we learn belongs to someone younger. Teenagers aged 13 to 17 can use Driftbottle, so these standards also protect the young people who use it.

How Driftbottle limits contact between strangers

• There's no chat, no direct messages, no friend lists and no profiles to browse. A bottle is a one-off message left at a real place, not a conversation.
• No one is anonymous: every bottle shows who dropped it — their bottler name, or their username — to the person who picks it up. Nobody nearby sees that name before then.
• No player sees where anyone is. The app shows no maps, coordinates or distances, only that a bottle is within reach, and we don't store players' locations — only where bottles are, and a player's bottle isn't kept at their exact spot but somewhere within 40 metres of it.
• No player sees when anyone else dropped a bottle.
• Some things do reach other players: whoever picks up your bottle sees your name, so they can tell you were somewhere near there at some point; a label you draw on a bottle you found is seen by whoever finds it next (but not who drew it), and never by that bottle's owner; and a player can add their social media links to a bottle they drop. When you pick up a bottle, its owner only sees that it was found — not who found it or where, not any label you add, and the app doesn't show them when (it tells you this before you pick one up).
• Bottles and labels can be reported, and players blocked: blocking the bottler who dropped a bottle hides both players' bottles from each other, and blocking whoever drew a label you were shown keeps them from finding yours (without telling you who they are).

If you're under 18: use a username and bottler name that aren't your real name; never put your name, school, address, phone number or social media in a bottle or a label; don't drop or pick up bottles near your home or school if you don't want other players to know you're there; never arrange to meet anyone because of a bottle; and tell a parent, guardian or another adult you trust if anything on Driftbottle makes you uncomfortable — then report it and block the player.

Zero tolerance for child sexual abuse and exploitation

Driftbottle prohibits any content or behavior that sexually abuses, exploits or endangers children. That includes:

• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — any image, drawing, recording or text that depicts, describes or promotes the sexual abuse of a minor.
• Grooming — contacting or befriending a minor in order to sexually abuse or exploit them, including trying to move them to another app or to meet them in person.
• Sextortion — threatening or blackmailing someone with intimate images of a minor, or to get them.
• Trafficking — recruiting, advertising or arranging the exploitation of a child, sexual or otherwise.
• Sexualizing minors in any way, including sexual comments about a child or sexualized pictures of one.

Anyone who breaks these standards is banned from Driftbottle.

How to report

• In the app: open the Bottles tab, then Found (or Saved), tap the flag button on the bottle, pick a reason and tap Submit report. That covers a label someone else drew on it, which is part of the bottle. A labeled bottle in your inventory, on the Drop tab, has a flag button of its own. Reports go to our moderators, never to the person you reported.
• Block them with the block button on the same bottle or label, so they don't find your bottles again.
• By email, with or without the app or an account: write to [email protected] with "Child safety" in the subject. Tell us what you saw and where — the bottle's name, and roughly where and when you found it. Please don't send us copies of abusive images.
• If a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. You can also report child sexual abuse material directly to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) at report.cybertip.org.

What we do

• Our moderators review reports promptly, aiming to act within 24 hours.
• We remove the content and ban the accounts involved.
• Every report keeps a copy of what was reported, even if it or the account behind it is deleted afterwards, for one year — or for a year after we report it to NCMEC or the authorities ask us to keep it (see our Privacy Policy).
• We report child sexual abuse material to NCMEC and to other relevant authorities as required by law, and cooperate with law enforcement as the law requires.

Child safety contact

Questions or concerns about child safety on Driftbottle: [email protected], with "Child safety" in the subject. See also our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.