When my friend called me over to show me what they are calling ” The Yelp for People” I thought she was joking. Yelp? As in reviews? For people? It’s pretty much the last step in turning human beings, our beloved family and friends, full of life and different personalities, into yet another commodity. Hey, where the barcodes at?

It wasn’t enough for Google and Facebook to label us as nothing more than an ID number, using our looks, demographic, sex, and lifestyle analytics as a way to con us into purchasing yet another product that we don’t need. But seriously, how can we resist the temptation not to click on something that says “Doctors HATE this woman!”. I suppose big brands pitting our friends against us (and our bank accounts) in the form of affiliate or sponsored marketing to impose on what used to be our most trusted source of referrals, word-of-mouth, didn’t QUITE make the cut. And of course, being able to select eachother for a date night (or potentially an evening of netflix & chill) out of the catalogue that we call Tinder, wasn’t quite enough to objectify us.

Now we get rated after purchase too…………

Peeple is a new app that was SURPRISINGLY (to me at least) released by a female duo. Don’t we, as women, have to live up to enough public scrutiny without having questions filled out on us like a post-coffee shop “How Was Your Service” survey, with the subject instead being focused on our personal, professional and dating life? Chrissy Teigan, the wife of John Legend and girl crush to many twitter-ranted it quite eloquently:

Literally, I feel like you’re going to have to watch your back at every turn. Forget cutting someone off on the highway, or yelling at the barista at Starbucks for not giving you extra whip cream….kidding, I would never do that.

But seriously, we have to live our lives on edge, just praying that there’s no one waiting on the helm to dig up the dirt on us that we had just finished burying. Even if we’re squeaky clean, like a Porsche on the right side of a car wash, doesn’t mean that some hate filled, under-achieving jerk isn’t going to try and tarnish our name by fabricating stories to try and throw us off our A-game. We all know who those people are, they’re the same ones that spend hours (even days) name-bashing on twitter or actually answering all the questions on Yahoo! Answers. You know who you are.

So what’s the lowdown on Peeple?

Essentially, the founders of Peeple must think that bad publicity is good publicity because they have the internet in an uproar, and angry exes just foaming at the mouth waiting for the app to finally be released in November.

The app pits 2 people against eachother in battles of “who is more likely to….” and “who would rather”. It’s a 9 year old’s sleepover on for adults, and without spin the bottle. Essentially today, on October 3rd #meangirlappreciationday it is being coined as the reincarnated burn-book, in app format.

Is anyone safe? We’re not sure. It seems as if even if you do not opt in to create a profile for yourself, any one who has access to your phone number, can create one for you without your consent.

As for me, I’m going to treat it like an annoying pest, avoid eye contact and slowly back away, in hopes that it will slowly fade into the abyss like another social media internet fad (*cough* myspace). I think that we all, especially young people, have enough scrutiny and socially construed standards to try and live up to on a daily basis.

If you are planning on downloading the app, Angela has eloquelty posted the instructions below so feel free to follow along:

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Images from thedailymail.co.uk and huffingtonpost.com