Safety
Student safety comes first.
0Skips is built for people who are 13 to 18. These are the protections that are in the product itself, not in a policy document.
- Stage names only A stage name and an avatar are what the site shows. Real names, contacts and addresses live in a separate vault the public site cannot reach.
- Under 18? Parent permission before anything official A teen can explore and plan first. Students under 18 need a parent or guardian's permission before uploads, coaching, official submission or anything public; students who are 18 can give it themselves. Permission to publish is given one video at a time.
- Coaches stay behind the scenes No coach contacts a student directly. Feedback reaches students through 0Skips, and nothing a student makes goes public without a named person approving it.
How we protect students
- A stage name, not a real name
- The site shows a stage name and an avatar. Real names, parent contacts, shipping addresses, college savings statements and gift codes live in a separate vault that the public site cannot reach at all — a single dedicated service can read it, and nothing else can.
- Permission before official participation
- A teen can create a basic account, pick a stage name, explore and start planning on their own. Students under 18 need a parent or guardian's permission before uploads, coaching, official submission, and any public or supporter-facing feature; students who are 18 can give that permission themselves. Permission to publish is given one video at a time, and permission can be withdrawn.
- No direct coach-student contact
- Coaches work behind the scenes. They review feedback and scoring guidance inside 0Skips before it reaches a student; they never message, call or meet a student. Released feedback is visible to the parent and stored. A coach is never assigned the same student twice in a season.
- Volunteers are screened before they see student work
- Before a volunteer coach or judge can see any unpublished student work, they complete a short application, agree to the Code of Conduct and confidentiality requirements, complete required training, and verify their identity. Each volunteer sees only what their role needs.
- Judges work through the platform
- Judges score entries inside 0Skips on a published rubric. They have no channel to a student, and a judge never scores a student they have coached, are related to, or support.
- No social graph, and no inbox
- There are no connections, no follower lists and no messaging between accounts. No adult has a private channel to a student anywhere on the platform. Encouragement from an Artist Support Crew is one-way, from a fixed set of options, visible to the parent, and logged.
- Identity kept separate from AI
- When AI helps assess a song, 0Skips sends the audio and the contest material the model needs, and never attaches a legal name, a stage name, a school, a contact or an account link. AI results are provisional, and a person reviews what matters.
- Private first
- While a student is working, only they, the coach reviewing their entry and the staff who need to look can see it. Drafts are never public and never sit on a public address.
- A named human approves anything public
- Every upload — drafts, images, receipts, notes, selfies — is hash-scanned, checked by an automated classifier, and put in front of a person where anything is flagged. Nothing a student makes becomes public without a named human's approval, recorded in a log that cannot be edited afterwards.
- The video stays the family's
- A qualifying video is published on the family's own YouTube channel, so the family holds the off switch. It can stay unlisted while the entry is being made and tested; once the entry is live in the contest, the official video is public, under a stage name.
- No chance, and nothing to buy
- There is no randomness anywhere in the winner path: no random tiebreaks, no surprise rewards. Money can support a student. It cannot buy a vote, a score, or a place in the Finale.
- Honest messages, with a parent copied
- 0Skips may send students age-appropriate messages: reminders, encouragement, progress prompts, deadline reminders, and invitations to continue or come back. Messages are transparent and never deceptive. For participants under 18, a parent or guardian is copied on what we send, including reminders.
- Cookieless analytics, and no ad tech
- Site measurement is cookieless and carries no personal data. There is no ad-tech, no session replay and no cross-site tracking, and sponsor advertising is counted without attaching anything about the viewer.
If something goes wrong
Every page has a route to a person, not a form queue. If a student writes something that worries us — about their own safety or anyone else's — a named adult sees it quickly, and the parent is contacted.
Anyone can ask for something to come down: the student or family whose work it is, or someone reporting a rights problem, a safety problem, or content about them. Both routes reach a human.
If a student may be at risk right now, contact your local emergency services first. Then tell us.