Child Safety Standards

Last updated: August 8, 2026

Vaylume is a travel-companion app for adults and older teenagers. This page sets out our standards against child sexual abuse and exploitation, how anyone can report it to us, and what we do when a report arrives. It is written to be checked: every protection described here is one we have actually built, and where something is a commitment rather than an automated system, we say so plainly.

1. What we prohibit

Child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE) means any sexual abuse or exploitation of a person under 18. It includes, and is not limited to:

• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) — any image or video depicting the sexual abuse of a child. Producing, possessing, sharing or requesting it is a criminal offence in Germany and in essentially every country we operate in.
• Grooming — building a relationship with a child in order to sexually abuse or exploit them, including offline.
• Sextortion — threatening to share a child's intimate images to obtain money, further images, or anything else.
• Solicitation — asking a child for sexual content, sexual contact, or a meeting for those purposes.
• Trafficking — advertising, arranging or facilitating the sexual exploitation of a child, including through travel.
• Sexualisation of minors — presenting a child in a sexualised way, in images, text, or a trip listing.

All of this is banned on Vaylume without exception, without warning, and regardless of where it happens on the service — a profile, a trip listing, a group chat, a private message, or a photo. There is no first-offence tolerance for any of it.

Travel deserves a specific line. Vaylume exists to help people meet and travel together, so we state it directly: using this service to arrange, seek, advertise or facilitate sexual contact with a minor — in any country, under any framing — is prohibited, will end the account permanently, and will be reported to law enforcement.

2. Who is allowed to hold an account

Vaylume requires you to be at least 16 years old. Under-16s cannot hold an account, in any country. Anyone under 13 is outside the service entirely and always will be.

How that is enforced, honestly:

• A neutral age gate. We collect a full date of birth at signup. The screen does not state our minimum age and the date picker is not pre-limited — an app that says "you must be 16+" has just told a twelve-year-old which year to enter.
• Date of birth is write-once. It cannot be edited afterwards to work around a restriction.
• We act on what we learn. No date-of-birth field can stop a determined child from lying, and we will not claim otherwise. What we can do is make it easy to tell us — so the in-app report form carries a dedicated reason for reporting a suspected underage user, and those reports go to a human, not to a counter.
• Removal. Where we establish that an account holder is under our minimum age, the account is removed and its personal data deleted.

Vaylume is not directed to children, is not marketed to children, and does not use child-appealing branding.

3. How to report

Anyone can report, whether or not they have a Vaylume account, and whether or not they are the person affected.

In the app

Every user profile and every trip carries a Report action. Open the profile or trip → tap Report → choose a reason → add anything you want us to know → submit. Reports land directly in our moderation queue. Reasons include a safety concern, inappropriate content, and a suspected underage user.

By email

• Child safety, including anything involving a minor: childsafety@vaylume.app
• Illegal content of any kind (our notice-and-action point under Article 16 of the EU Digital Services Act): report@vaylume.app

You do not need to include the material itself, and you should not forward it. A link, a username, a trip name, or a description of where to find it is enough for us to act.

If a child is in immediate danger

Contact the police first. In Germany and across the EU, dial 110 (police) or 112 (emergency services). Reporting to us as well is helpful, but it is not a substitute for the police, and nothing on this page should delay that call.

4. What we do when we receive a report

1. Child-safety reports are prioritised above every other report type and are reviewed by a person, not resolved automatically.
2. We preserve the evidence. Suspected child sexual abuse material is moved to a locked hold and is not deleted — deleting it would destroy the evidence law enforcement needs. It is not viewed beyond what is strictly necessary to act on it, and only by our designated child-safety contact.
3. We freeze the account immediately, which cuts off messaging, trips and uploads while we act.
4. We report to law enforcement. Vaylume is a German company, so our primary route is the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA). Where there is a United States nexus we also report to NCMEC's CyberTipline.
5. We remove the account permanently and take reasonable steps to stop the same person returning.
6. We retain the material for as long as the law requires us to, and no longer.

Anyone whose content we remove or whose account we restrict is told what happened and why, as required by Article 17 of the Digital Services Act, except where telling them would interfere with a law-enforcement matter.

5. Automated checking of photos

Every image uploaded to Vaylume is checked before anyone can see it. This is the part people usually get wrong, so here is exactly how it works:

• An upload lands in a private holding area that no user can read — not the uploader, not anyone else.
• It is checked for sexual content and for graphic violence (Google Cloud Vision), and inspected to confirm the file really is the image type it claims to be.
• An image is published only if it passes. It is never published first and checked afterwards.
• If the check fails, the image is rejected and never delivered. If the check cannot be completed, or the result is uncertain, the image stays unpublished and waits for a human. Uncertainty never resolves in favour of publishing.
• Repeated violations count against the account and lead to suspension.

What this does not do. An adult-content classifier detects pornography. It does not detect child sexual abuse material — that requires matching against databases of known material, which is a different technology, and we will not describe ourselves as having a capability we do not have. Suspected CSAM reaches us through human reports and human review, and is escalated as described in §4.

6. Communication and location

• Location sharing is off by default, must be switched on deliberately, and can be switched off at any time, which stops sharing immediately.
• Location is never public. It is visible only to confirmed members of the same trip.
• Location data is deleted automatically after a period of inactivity, even if it was never switched off.
• A trip's meeting point is visible only to confirmed members of that trip, never to the public listing.
• Users can block another user, which ends contact in both directions.
• A trip host decides who joins their trip — a join request has to be approved.
• A trip host can remove a member from their trip at any time after admitting them.

7. Our staff

Access to reported material is restricted to the designated child-safety contact named in §9. Anyone who is given moderation access in future will be subject to the same restriction and to a background check appropriate to the role before receiving it.

8. Complying with the law

Vaylume complies with child-protection law in the jurisdictions where it operates, including German criminal law (§§ 184b, 184c StGB), the EU Digital Services Act, and — for users in the United States — the reporting obligations that apply to providers serving them. We respond to lawful requests from law enforcement and preserve data when asked to.

9. Designated child-safety contact

This is also the contact point for Google, Apple, and for any authority or child-protection organisation that needs to reach us about a child-safety matter.

10. Enforcement

Breaching these standards leads to content removal, account suspension, removal from a trip, permanent removal from Vaylume, and a report to law enforcement. For anything involving the sexual exploitation of a child, the outcome is the last two, immediately.

These standards sit alongside our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Community Guidelines. Where this page and another document differ on child safety, this page governs. We review it whenever the service changes in a way that affects it, and the "last updated" date above always reflects the current text.