Whisper app is a phenomenally popular app with teens. Whisper has a total of 17 billion monthly page views on its mobile and desktop websites with 250 million monthly users, mostly teens, across 187 countries. It was recently used by a child predator to contact and rape a 12-year-old girl in Pasco County, Florida.

Description: Whisper is available on iOS and Android mobile devices, free of charge. It is a form of anonymous social media, allowing users to post and share photo and video messages anonymously, The posts, called “”whispers””, consist of text superimposed over an image, and the background imagery is either automatically retrieved from Whisper’s own search engine or uploaded by the user.

You can respond to a message publicly or privately, choosing a public anonymous post or a private pseudonymous chat. Users don’t have a public identity in the app. While they do have persistent handles, there’s no way to contact them except through the messages they post.

APP Store rating: 17+ (infrequent/mild profanity or crude humor, suggestive themes, alcohol, tobacco, or drug use)

What parents need to know:

Whisper violates my two basic rules of online safety: Users are anonymous, and it allows strangers to contact children. It also has some serious privacy concerns.

No Parental Controls: Whisper does not have parental controls. Casual use will find extremely sexually suggestive material in the form of provocative pictures and words. In the settings, you can hide “NSFW” (not safe for work) content from showing up in the Home feed, but you can not lock this setting. The Whisper app can’t be monitored with conventional web filters including OpenDNS. Whisper also reveals a user’s location, which can compromise privacy and safety. With location ...