The creators behind the increasingly popular karaoke app StarMaker have had a pretty good month. As Tubefilter reports, the company’s recent funding round attracted $6.5 million from investors.
The app is similar to console and arcade karaoke games like the popular SingStar series. Users can select a range of popular songs which they sing into their phone microphone and receive points based on performance.
The app’s popularity has been growing rapidly, particularly thanks to its affiliation with reality singing contest The Voice and a recent competition that gave the winner a chance to sing with UK group Clean Bandit.
However, the app has proved particularly popular as a YouTube attraction. Though it makes no secret of the function, unbeknownst to some, StarMaker uploads videos of its users to an official YouTube channel.
The practice has resulted in more than a few unfortunate, and in some cases possibly illegal, incidents. According to posts in a Reddit thread discussing the app, a video of an apparently underage girl singing in her underwear made it to YouTube but was later deleted.
This aspect of the StarMaker app is not clandestine. It’s detailed in the app’s privacy policy that the app “collect[s] and store[s] the audio and video recordings that you choose to make within [the app]” whilst signed into your StarMaker account.
“The video is accessible via the Services through a link on your Account profile to the applicable channel on YouTube. When you save a video, by default the video is set as a ‘public’ video both on the Services and on YouTube,” the privacy terms read.
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If a user wishes to save the video of their performance, a prompt box appears informing users that saving will upload their performance clip to YouTube. Regardless, inappropriate videos have still found their way online.
What makes this particularly disturbing is the app seems to be geared towards underage users. Both the cartoonish interface of the app and the song choices, which are mostly Top 40 hits, seem designed to attract users in their teens and under. It’s essentially catered towards them.
More worrying still is the seeming lack of parental controls included in the app. When signing up or “saving” a video, the user is not prompted to attain any kind of parental consent.
Meanwhile, StarMaker insist their services “are NOT directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect PII [personally identifiable information] from children under 13”.
They also write that they “encourage parents to take precautions to assure that their household is safe and protected when creating and sharing this video content”.
Under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a US federal law enacted in 1998, photos, videos, and audio recordings that contain a child’s image or voice are considered “personal information”.
Operators covered by COPPA must therefore either pre-screen and delete any photos, videos, or audio from children’s submissions to a site, or “first give parents notice and obtain their consent” prior to permitting children to upload such content.
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The fact that the app uploads user videos to a centralised StarMaker account and not a user’s personal YouTube channel also poses potential abuse issues.
According to one Reddit user, someone was able to record “actual porn” and upload it. While the video has since been deleted by StarMaker admins, theoretically a user could record anything and easily upload it to the StarMaker channel where it could be viewed by underage users.
If StarMaker wishes to be a responsible company, they would do well to introduce more stringent screening functions as well as some degree of parental controls. After all, the app is free and does not require a credit card to purchase.
