We are several weeks into the school year and you may be thinking the dust has settled. Unfortunately, new apps are appearing on our students’ phones causing issues at school and at home.

In my book, Parenting in a Digital World, I lay out the two basic problems with social media. First, children can meet people outside their parent’s knowledge; and secondly, social media removes the normal inhibitions face-to-face interactions normally entail. This new crop of apps neatly fall into the two categories of problems just discussed. The same problems we experienced with last year’s apps are just getting repackaged into a new shiny container for our children to experience over again.

Meeting Strangers

These new “friending” apps enable kids to easily connect and chat with people they don’t know. What makes these apps different than others we have seen in the past, they piggyback on other very popular social media apps that students already have. These new apps are leveraging the user base of apps like Instagram and Snapchat. This is insidiously brilliant. A child who has Instagram may look at one of these “friending” apps as an add-on and not a problem. These friending apps also use your child’s GPS location. So, the strangers they are meeting are all nearby, increasing the chance of face-to-face meetings. The possibilities are frightening to say the least.

MyLOL is an app advertised for “teen dating.” Although the app is intended for users over the age of 17, there is no age verification. Posts on this app are often half-naked pictures of teens. Users engage in flirty or even sexually explicit conversations. Chat topics often include references to sex, drug use, alcohol, or violence. There are some very real privacy concerns since some users post their real names, IM handles, email addresses, and phone numbers.

Spotafriend identifies itself as a Tinder alternative. Like Tinder, this location-based app lets you ...