Parents' Guide to Profoundly: Anonymous Chats

This invasive, mostly non-functional app insists you connect it to your Facebook account, demands all kinds of personal information, then fails to perform as advertised. It's just another example of a poor app concept, poorly executed.

The first defect in Profoundly: Anonymous Chats is its dependence on Facebook which seemingly undermines the idea of anonymity from the get-go. If it's based on your Facebook profile, how's it anonymous? And is the idea to flood the feeds of your hapless, unsuspecting friends with anonymous posts? The first is just baffling—the second sounds like a way to harass your nearest and dearest. We can't know for sure though, since Profoundly: Anonymous Chats is basically non-functional. The Search function returns either nothing or an error (“Error friend not found"), and no matter how many Stories you create, the interface congratulates you on making your “first story.” There's no way to see your stories, and friends who see them on Facebook see an ad for Profoundly rather than content you created. Worse, the Settings menu contains nothing useful: no parental controls, no way to opt out of notifications or anonymous questions, no way to hide responses to anonymous questions. Worst of all, if you delete your account, the app's development company keeps your information for up to nine months. The current trend of anonymous feedback apps is insidious at best, and Profoundly: Anonymous Chats, with its combination of potentially harmful concept and broken features, is one of the worst you'll find in the app store.