A private girls school on Sydney's north shore has banned an app that is enormously popular with tweens over concerns about child safety and "highly sexualised dance moves".
Musical.ly, an app that allows users to make short videos of themselves lip-syncing to pop songs, might sound harmless but a cyber safety expert warns that there is pornographic content on the app and it publishes users' location information along with their videos.
Roslyn Mahony, the head of Wenona's junior school, and Beth Oakley, Dean of Students, wrote to parents on Monday over concerns that girls in years 4, 5 and 6 were using the popular app to upload videos of themselves singing and dancing, in some cases in school uniform.
"Understandably, young people are easily influenced by the music videos they view. When the celebrities whose music they enjoy present their songs with highly sexualised dance moves, these performance styles are then imitated as girls create their own music videos through the app," the letter says.
"A number of girls have been singing and dancing and uploading performances in school uniform, which introduces numerous other potential risks. Even in cases where girls have recognised the importance of selecting a privacy setting, there is still a sense of achievement in drawing high numbers of followers, and user names don't clearly correlate with a person's actual name, the result being that girls will accept friend requests all too quickly, without ensuring they do know the person!"
The letter says students will be asked to remove apps from the devices they bring to school if they do not meet age restrictions.
Sydney-based cyber safety expert Leonie Smith says "Musical.ly is incredibly popular in primary schools.... Most parents actually don't know how it works. They don't know for instance that kids can post these videos publicly so anyone who has the app can see it, and potentially their location. That they can have followers that are adults, who can privately message them.
"The big concerns are there is adult content and the privacy controls aren't being used by lots of kids. ... People are hijacking some of the hashtags with pornography, which is what happens with Instagram.
"Wherever there are a lot of young kids with open accounts you're going to get creeps. That's the bottom line."
Musical.ly's terms of service says its users must be over 13, and claims it will delete the accounts of underage users when it is notified of them, but from her own research Ms Smith said this does not appear to be happening enough. The app also collects and publishes the location of its users.
To create a private account, users must proactively switch on privacy controls and turn off location settings.
Reviews on parenting website Commonsense Media report that the app contains "adult video content".
"I thought it was just an innocent app where you can lip-synch and make music videos. ... there were some music videos that had inappropriate language in them. After watching a lot of other videos that were on there by others, the majority of them were inappropriate and had suggestive language and dancing... including adult content".
Another user wrote, "If your child searches the hashtags, they WILL find pornographic videos. It took me less than a minute after I installed the app to find it."
Safety expert Ms Smith said parents should understand the apps their kids are using, ensure the privacy settings are on and location settings are off.
Wenona's action follows a similar letter to parents of Year 6 children at Shore in June, where the school raised concerns about Year 6 boys using Instagram's messaging service inappropriately. Instagram's user policy also requires users to be aged over 13.
The letter dated June 8 from Nick Saunders, the head of Shore Preparatory School, asked parents to delete the accounts and encouraged parents "to ensure they have access to any on-line accounts held by boys so activity can be monitored."
Schools are grappling with the explosive popularity of social media and photo or video sharing apps and the potential risks they create for children.
On Monday a pornographic photo-sharing website where users request images of children from particular schools - including Wenona - reappeared online 10 days after it was shut down by authorities. The photos were apparently shared without their subjects' consent.
The schools did not respond by deadline to a request for comment.
