The company Wizz is coming under serious scrutiny by regulators and watchdogs for enabling child sexual predators on a huge scale.
These days, startups are trying just about everything. Some of them are wacky, if harmless, like the company turning your loved ones’ remains into stones for you to display. Others fall into the “why did you do that” category — like the startup selling an AI-powered toilet camera to analyze your stool.
A startup called Wizz is clearly the latter, in the darkest sense imaginable. Peddling “age-appropriate engagement” for users as young as 13, Wizz is a French app built on the “swipe left or right” framework typical of dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge.
Given the massive rise in child predation enabled by social media, that’s a huge responsibility — and one Wizz has fallen way short of. Though it’s meant to connect kids with others their age, in reality it’s become a mechanism for predators to meet underaged victims.
