Child Safety & CSAE Protection

1. Our commitment

JoinMeIn exists to bring adults together safely in real life. No child will ever be a user of this platform, and no part of our service may be used to create, share, request, distribute, or promote sexual content involving a minor, or to solicit, groom, coerce, or otherwise harm a child. This is not a community guideline - it is an absolute rule, enforced by automated detection, human review, instant account termination, and mandatory reporting to law enforcement and designated child-protection authorities worldwide.

2. Scope & definitions

This policy applies to every user, visitor, guest, third-party integration, developer, and employee interacting with any JoinMeIn product, website, application, or service, globally.

Key definitions

• Child / Minor: Any person under 18 years of age, regardless of the age of majority or consent in any local jurisdiction. JoinMeIn applies the strictest definition globally.
• CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material): Any visual, audio, textual, or digitally generated depiction, including AI-generated or "deepfake" material, that sexualizes a minor or portrays a minor in a sexual context.
• CSAE (Child Sexual Abuse & Exploitation): The broader category encompassing CSAM, grooming, online enticement, sextortion, trafficking, livestreaming of abuse, and any form of sexual exploitation of a minor.
• Grooming: Building trust with a minor, or someone the user believes to be a minor, in preparation for sexual abuse, exploitation, or off-platform contact with harmful intent.
• Sextortion: The coercion of a person to produce, send, or perform sexual acts by threatening to release sexual material.

3. Age verification & age assurance

JoinMeIn is strictly an 18+ service. Every account passes through a layered age-assurance process before any radar, chat, or experience feature becomes available.

4. Proactive prevention by design

We treat child safety as a design principle, not a feature. The following controls are baked into the product architecture:

• No minor accounts. There is no "teen mode," no supervised account, and no under-18 access pathway of any kind on JoinMeIn.
• Radar restrictions. Our location radar does not reveal precise coordinates of any user to any other user. Approximate radii are computed on-device, and no user's home or routine location can be inferred.
• Image upload screening. Every image uploaded - profile photos, chat attachments, experience images - is scanned before it is stored. See Section 5 for detection tooling.
• Chat friction for strangers. Unsolicited first messages are rate-limited and screened for known grooming patterns before delivery.
• No unsupervised minor-adult interaction is possible by design. Because there are no minors on the platform, there is no minor-adult surface. Any adult who attempts to contact a user who represents themselves as a minor is immediately flagged, investigated, and reported.
• Experience integrity. Experience hosts undergo verified-host onboarding. Experiences with content intended for or marketed to minors are removed and the host is banned.
• Staff training. All employees, contractors, and moderators complete mandatory annual CSAE identification and response training, including specific training on grooming indicators, sextortion patterns, and mandatory reporting obligations.

5. Detection tools & technology

JoinMeIn deploys layered automated detection at every content entry point. Positive matches on known CSAM result in immediate content blocking, account suspension, and authority reporting.

End-to-end encryption & safety

JoinMeIn uses end-to-end encryption (Signal Protocol) for direct messages. We believe user privacy and child safety are both essential. To balance them:

• Detection is performed pre-encryption on the sender device for image hashes, where technically possible and legally permissible, using only on-device matching against downloaded hash lists.
• Unencrypted operational metadata (message velocity, recipient age signals, reporting patterns) is monitored server-side.
• Any user-submitted report of an encrypted conversation unlocks a recipient-confirmed ability to forward the reported content for human review, without decrypting conversations at scale.
• We do not now, and will not, implement bulk server-side scanning of encrypted content. We will, however, comply with valid legal process under each applicable jurisdiction.

6. Human moderation

Automated tools never act alone on CSAE material. Every automated signal is reviewed by a trained human - and every user report is reviewed by a human within defined service levels.

7. How to report

If you see, suspect, or experience anything that involves the sexual abuse or exploitation of a child on JoinMeIn - or anywhere else - please report it. Reports can be made anonymously. You do not need to be a JoinMeIn user to file one.

In-app reporting

Every profile, experience, message, and image on JoinMeIn has a Report action. Select "Child safety concern" and the report is routed directly to our Trust & Safety team, bypassing the standard queue.

8. Authority reporting

Where CSAM or CSAE is confirmed on our platform, JoinMeIn reports to the relevant national authority as required by law, and preserves evidence according to each jurisdiction's statutory retention requirement.

Law-enforcement cooperation

JoinMeIn responds promptly to lawful requests from law enforcement. We maintain a dedicated, secure, 24/7 law-enforcement portal and publish our law-enforcement guidelines at joinmein.io/law-enforcement. Emergency disclosures (when there is a risk of imminent harm to a child) are handled within hours, 24/7, regardless of weekend or holiday.

9. Enforcement actions

When we confirm a CSAE policy violation, we take every one of the following actions, in this order, simultaneously:

1. Immediate permanent account termination.
2. Device-level and account-level bans that persist across re-registration attempts, to the extent technically and lawfully permitted.
3. Preservation of all associated content, logs, metadata, and identifying information for statutory periods, pursuant to the preservation duty under 18 U.S.C. § 2258A(h) and equivalent provisions.
4. Submission of a CyberTipline report to NCMEC for routing to appropriate law enforcement (and/or to the relevant national authority outside the US).
5. Review of every user who interacted with the offender to identify additional victims or perpetrators.
6. Case review by the Child Safety Lead, including a documented root-cause analysis of why detection missed the violation (if applicable).
7. Policy or tooling updates based on the root-cause review.

There is no appeal, reinstatement, or arbitration pathway for accounts terminated for confirmed CSAE violations.

10. Legal & regulatory compliance

JoinMeIn is architected to meet the strictest of the applicable regulatory regimes in every market where we operate:

• United States: 18 U.S.C. § 2258A (NCMEC mandatory reporting and evidence preservation); SESTA-FOSTA (18 U.S.C. § 1591, § 2421A); the PROTECT Act; COPPA (for the avoidance of any collection of data from children under 13); state-level mandatory reporter laws where applicable.
• United Kingdom: Online Safety Act 2023 - illegal content duties, child-safety duties, and proactive technology requirements; Protection of Children Act 1978; Sexual Offences Act 2003; Ofcom Codes of Practice.
• European Union: Digital Services Act (Articles 14, 16, 18, 34-35 risk-mitigation duties); proposed CSAM Regulation (detection and reporting obligations); GDPR Article 6(1)(c) for lawful processing of CSAE-related personal data; Directive 2011/93/EU on combating sexual abuse of children.
• India: Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act 2012; IT Act 2000 Section 67B; IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021; Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023.
• App-store policies: Apple App Store Review Guidelines Section 1.1 and Section 1.2; Google Play Child Safety Standards and Inappropriate Content Policy.

Where regimes conflict, JoinMeIn applies the stricter rule globally. We do not operate tiered safety for markets with weaker enforcement.

11. Transparency reporting

JoinMeIn publishes a biannual transparency report covering child safety actions, at joinmein.io/transparency. The report includes:

• Number of user reports received under each CSAE category.
• Number of accounts actioned (suspended, terminated) for CSAE violations.
• Number of CyberTipline reports submitted to NCMEC and equivalent reports to NCA, IWF, EU hotlines, and Indian authorities.
• Volume of content removed as CSAM.
• Government data-request statistics.
• Independent audit findings, where applicable.

12. Help & resources

If you or someone you know has been affected by child sexual abuse or online exploitation, the following organizations offer free, confidential support - whether or not the incident occurred on JoinMeIn:

13. Contact information

For policy questions, reporting follow-up, or press inquiries related to child safety at JoinMeIn: