The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a complaint against Sendit, an anonymous questioning app that gained popularity with Gen Z and Younger, in order to illegally collect child data, deceive users who sent messages, and trick users into purchasing memberships.
With Sendit, users who are mostly teenagers can send anonymous questions to each other via their integration with Instagram, Tiktok, or Snapchat. Several such apps have been born over the years, including Yolo and LMK. This was suspended on Snapchat in 2021 due to a lawsuit against a child’s suicide. After that halt, Sendit quickly won 3.5 million downloads. Users flocked to the app and replaced what was no longer available.
By the following year, TechCrunch Reporting discovered that new anonymous questioning apps such as Sendit and LMK mislead users with fake messages, offering in-app purchases to reveal who sent the message.
The report is reflected in the FTC complaint, saying that Sendit sent a fake, provocative message to users (“Do you ever get it with me?” or “Have you ever done drugs?”).
If users want to see who sent the message, they can spend $9.99 on “diamond membership,” but the FTC claims it’s not clear that this is a weekly payment and not a one-off fee. If a user reveals the “ID” behind a message actually submitted by Sendit, they are given false information.
The FTC also accused Sendit of knowingly collecting data about users under the age of 13 without parental consent, which is illegal under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). In particular, the FTC cited instances from 2022, when more than 116,000 users reported being under the age of 13, but did not inform parents that their symbolic minds had collected this data and did not ask for permission.
That same year, TechCrunch discovered that Sendit users complained in an App Store review that the Sendit app, the Instagram app, wanted the marketing itself to be downloaded as “Sendit Reveal.”
At the time, when TechCrunch asked Sendit founder Hunter Rice about these dark patterns, he suggested he was looking for ClickBait.
“There are a lot of great things about what we’re doing and what is newsworthy,” Rice told TechCrunch in 2022.
Sendit sued its competitor NGL in 2022, saying it stole fake anonymous questions and other trade secret ideas. NGL was then forced to end the practice to remain in the App Store following the TechCrunch report.
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