Content safety: clear lines on sexual content

Hyv now has a content-safety check for member messages, voice notes, photo captions, replies, image requests and phone calls. It refuses explicit sexual material while keeping the door open for honest questions about sexual health, relationships and consent. When a request crosses the line, Hyv explains calmly what it can and cannot do.

What is refused and what is allowed

Hyv only refuses requests that must be refused:

• Explicit material: pornography and sexually explicit text, images or replies.
• Finding people for sex: requests to find, contact or arrange sexual encounters.
• Real people: sexualising a real person in chat or in an image request.
• Rule workarounds: attempts to get around age checks, blocks or Hyv's safety rules.
• Minors: anything sexual that involves a minor.

Questions about sexual health, education, consent and relationships are allowed and answered. When a question sits close to the line, Hyv answers strictly with health or relationship education and points to public health bodies such as the World Health Organization, the NHS, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare or the National AIDS Control Organisation, without naming adult sites, apps or contacts.

How it works

The check runs across text messages, voice note transcripts and photo captions, as well as Hyv's own replies, image creation or editing requests and phone call goals.

• On a first or second refusal within 24 hours, Hyv writes one or two kind lines in your language to say what it cannot do and what it can help with instead.
• From the third refusal within 24 hours, Hyv replies with a fixed line in your language, supporting English and 12 Indian languages.
• Any request involving a minor receives an immediate fixed refusal that includes the Childline India 1098 helpline, and may alert Hyv's team without sharing the message text.
• Disallowed image prompts are refused before any image is created or edited, and disallowed phone call requests are refused before anyone is dialled.
• Refused messages are withheld immediately and are never saved to your chat history or memory. When a safety decision is recorded, only the category and outcome are kept for 90 days, never the words you sent, and those records are removed if your account is deleted.

Limits

• Each message is judged on its own, so a short follow-up that relies on earlier messages in the conversation can sometimes pass through.
• Hyv only knows a person's age when the message itself mentions it.
• Group messages that do not ask Hyv to respond are not checked.
• The fixed refusal lines in Indian languages are still awaiting a final check by native speakers.
• If the safety check is slow or unavailable, your message passes through without adding wait time.

Where it is today

This feature is off for now and is not live yet while we finish checking it. It has been tested against public safety samples, a set of 108 allowed health and relationship questions across nine Indian languages, and an anonymised sample of real messages across Hinglish, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Urdu, Telugu and Malayalam. In those tests, none of the allowed health and relationship questions were wrongly blocked.

Private by default. Consent before people. Restraint before action.