Child Safety Policy

1. What Is Absolutely Prohibited

The following are prohibited on OnFire without exception. No context, artistic claim, or stated intent makes any of them acceptable, and there is no warning stage.

• Child sexual abuse material — any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a person under 18.
• Sexualised depictions of minors that are drawn, animated, computer-generated, or produced with AI. That the child is not real does not make this permitted.
• Editing or generating an image to place a real child in sexual content.
• Grooming — building a relationship with a child in order to sexually exploit them, including moving a conversation to another service for that purpose.
• Sexual extortion of a minor, including threatening to share images to obtain more.
• Soliciting, offering, trading, or advertising any of the above, including through coded language.
• Arranging or facilitating the trafficking or sexual exploitation of a child offline.
• Sexual or romantic approaches by an adult to a person they know or believe to be a minor.

Accounts responsible for any of the above are removed permanently.

Some content involving children is not sexual but still causes harm — physical abuse, exploitation of a child's labour, or content identifying a child in a way that puts them at risk. This is also prohibited and can be reported the same way.

2. How to Report a Child at Risk

Where a working report option exists — feed posts, gallery photos, products shared in chat, marketplace and rental listings and users, and Live Gigs sessions (section 9) — use it and choose the child or minor safety category. Reports in that category are flagged as suspected child exploitation in our systems and separated from ordinary content reports.

You do not need to be certain. A report made in good faith that turns out to be mistaken is not held against you.

3. What Happens After a Report

When you submit a report in the child safety category, the report is recorded and flagged as suspected child exploitation, a copy of the reported content is captured so that it survives deletion, and the report is placed in a queue.

Outside Live Gigs, we cannot currently tell you what happens after that, because we cannot commit to it. We do not operate a staffed review desk for those reports, we do not guarantee that child safety reports are looked at ahead of other reports, and we do not commit to a time within which a report will be reviewed.

That is why the advice at the top of this page is to report to NCMEC, the IWF, or the police directly. Those organisations act on reports; at present we cannot promise that we will act on yours quickly. We would rather you knew that and used a faster route than trust a commitment we are not in a position to keep.

Live Gigs is different. A child safety report about a Live Gigs session is reviewed by the OnFire support team within 24 hours, and protective steps are taken straight away, before that review (section 9.5). If a child is in immediate danger, still contact the police first.

4. Our Legal Reporting Obligations

Where a provider obtains actual knowledge of apparent child sexual abuse material, US federal law (18 U.S.C. § 2258A) requires a report to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as soon as reasonably possible, and requires the associated material to be preserved. Comparable duties apply under UK and EU law. These duties are not discretionary and nothing in our other policies waives them.

We take those obligations seriously and will meet them where they are engaged.

To be straightforward with you: OnFire has not to date filed a report with NCMEC, and the automated reporting pathway in our systems is not yet operational. Where a report is required, it would currently be prepared and filed manually. We are working to bring the automated route into service.

5. Age on OnFire

Our Terms of Service set a minimum age of 13 (or the minimum age in your jurisdiction), 16 in the European Union unless a parent consents, and 18 for payments, marketplace and accommodation features. Users under 18 must have parental or guardian consent.

The consequences follow directly, and we would rather state them than let the design imply otherwise:

• For most accounts, we cannot tell whether the account belongs to an adult or a child.
• We cannot apply different settings, protections, or defaults to a minor's account, because we cannot identify one.
• We cannot exclude minors from any feature, including features intended for adults.
• We do not verify age, except that Live Gigs tutors' dates of birth are confirmed through identity verification.

Live Gigs is the exception. Only adults can book a Live Gigs lesson, and tutors must be at least 18, shown by the date of birth confirmed during identity verification. Buyers confirm a date of birth showing they are adults. Children take part only in a lesson booked by their parent or legal guardian, never through an account of their own (section 9).

A separate parental-consent process exists and has been used in a small number of cases; it is triggered by the jurisdiction inferred from a user's network location rather than by anyone declaring an age, so it does not identify minors generally. A further age check applies to specific regulated transactions such as vehicle rental, and is confined to those flows.

6. What We Detect, and What We Do Not

Where automated safety assessment does run, it covers text and audio only. Since child sexual abuse material is overwhelmingly an image and video problem, the detection that would matter most is the detection we do not currently have. Reporting is what finds this material on OnFire.

7. Visibility and Minors

There are no protections on OnFire specific to minors — no private-by-default accounts for under-18s, no restriction on adults contacting young users they are not connected to, no limits on discoverability, and no reduced engagement prompts. None of these can exist while no age is recorded, because there is no attribute to apply them to. Live Gigs lessons for children are the exception, with the safeguards in section 9.

If that is not the visibility you want, the effective control today is to not post to the feed or to stories. We are treating the absence of a privacy default as a priority to fix.

8. Information for Parents and Carers

We would rather give you an accurate picture than a reassuring one, so that you can make your own decision.

OnFire is a general-purpose messaging and social application. It is not designed for children and has no children's mode. We do not know the age of our users, we do not verify age, and outside Live Gigs lessons (section 9) we do not apply any protection specific to minors. Messages are not end-to-end encrypted. There are no parental controls, no supervised accounts, and no facility for a parent to view or manage a child's account.

The point most likely to matter to you: anything your child posts to the feed or to stories can be read by anyone on the internet, without an OnFire account, together with their name, profile photograph and any location they have set. There is no privacy setting that changes this, for adults or for children. If that is not what you want for your child, the only effective control today is not using those features.

Live Gigs is different. If you book a live lesson for your child, the safeguards in section 9 apply: you stay on camera, the tutor is verified and background-checked, and the session is recorded.

If you believe a child is using OnFire and you want the account removed, email [email protected]. To exercise data rights on a child's behalf, see the Privacy Policy.

9. Live Gigs: Lessons for Children

Live Gigs lets an adult book a live 1:1 video lesson with a tutor, including a lesson for their child. Because a child is on a live video call with an adult they do not know, Live Gigs has safeguards that the rest of OnFire does not. They are set out here; the rules for tutors are in the Live Gigs Seller Terms and the rules for parents in the Live Gigs Guardian Terms.

9.1 A parent or guardian books, and stays on camera

• Only an adult can book. A child never has a Live Gigs account and is identified to the tutor by first name only.
• The adult confirms that they are the child's parent or legal guardian and will stay on camera for the whole session. Children's sessions are labelled as such for the tutor before and during the call.
• If the guardian leaves the camera, the tutor can end the session at once or give the guardian 60 seconds to return; if they do not, the session ends. Repeated absence can cost the guardian the ability to book children's sessions.
• If a child appears in a session booked for an adult, the tutor must end it at once, and a high-priority report is raised.
• A parent can book a weekly series of lessons with the same tutor (Live Gigs Weekly Sessions Terms). Every lesson in a series has the same safeguards as a single lesson: the guardian stays on camera, the lesson is recorded, the tutor’s background check must stay valid for the whole series (lessons after it lapses are cancelled and refunded), and the tutor sees the child’s profile only around each lesson. A series gives the tutor no way to contact the family between lessons; all contact stays inside the scheduled Live Gigs room, and our emails about a series never contain the child’s name. A report during a child’s lesson ends that lesson at once; if the parent blocks the tutor, or the tutor may no longer teach children, the series ends and every future lesson is refunded.

9.2 Only verified, background-checked tutors teach children

• Every tutor passes identity verification through our payment provider, Stripe, before they can go online.
• A tutor is matched with a child's session only if they have opted in to teaching children and hold an approved criminal-record background check (a DBS check or the national equivalent). An approval lasts 1 year; when it expires, the tutor stops receiving children's sessions until it is renewed. The approval must stay valid for at least 4 hours after a match is made.
• Tutors must not contact a child they met on Live Gigs outside a session, or record, screenshot or stream a session.

Background checks are arranged by OnFire support with the tutor, using a provider in the tutor's country; support will name the provider on request. A tutor is approved only after support has seen the result.

9.3 Every session is recorded

Every Live Gigs session is recorded, including the free trial and children's sessions, and both sides are told before and during the call. Recordings are stored privately, never at a public address, and only authorised OnFire staff can open them; each access is logged. They are deleted 30 days after the session, but a recording is kept for as long as a report, dispute or review about that session is open. If recording fails, the session continues, and the session is flagged for moderators.

9.4 The child profile and photo checks

A parent can save an optional profile for their child: first name, age band, an optional photo, gender, interests and a short note. Only the parent and the tutor they choose see it, and the tutor only from the countdown until 15 minutes after the session; every tutor access is logged. Tutors who are offered the request but not yet chosen see only an age band and the interests, never the name, photo or gender. The matching AI receives only the age band and interests. Full details are in the Privacy Policy (Europe, United States).

• Photos are re-encoded and stripped of location and device data before they are stored, privately.
• Every photo is reviewed by our safety team before any tutor can see it, and stays hidden from tutors until then. A photo that is not approved is not used and is deleted after 90 days. There is no automated check and no matching against known-image hash databases (see section 6).
• Apparent child sexual abuse material is preserved and reported to NCMEC, and the account is restricted, as section 4 describes. As that section says, such a report is currently prepared and filed manually.

9.5 Reporting during and after a session

• Both sides can report at any time: before the call, during it (the report button is always on, including during the countdown), after it, and from their history. In a child's session the report form opens on the child or minor safety category.
• A child or minor safety report ends the session immediately. The report carries the session's details and recording, and the recording is kept until the case closes.
• The pair is never matched again, and the reporter can block the other person.
• A child or minor safety report about a tutor in a child's session suspends that tutor's eligibility to teach children straight away, and the tutor stays suspended until the report has been reviewed.
• For a paid session, the tutor is not paid while the report is open; if no decision is made within 5 days, a child-safety report by the parent results in a full refund of the lesson price.
• The reported person is not told who reported them.

If a child is in immediate danger, contact the police first, as the box at the top of this page says.