No, the Talking Angela app is not dangerous for your children

Talking Angela is many things: animated virtual cat, YouTube music star, one of the main stars of an app franchise being used by 230m people a month. She’s most definitely not the front for a paedophile ring.

That may sound like an obvious statement, but a Facebook hoax first identified a year ago has started doing the rounds again, spooking parents with its claims that the Talking Angela app is dangerous for children.

“CHECK YOUR KIDS TABLET OR PHONES TO SEE IF THEY HAVE THIS APP ITS A PEDO RING IVE JUST DOWNLOADED IT TO CHECK AND ITS DIGUSTING,” reads one warning that’s been spreading its anti-grammatical charms across Facebook in recent days.

It’s not true. Myth-busting website Snopes debunked it in February 2013, as did online security company Sophos. Now the latter firm has returned to the topic in February 2014 to tell parents that Outfit7’s popular app remains safe for kids.

Researcher Paul Ducklin published some examples of the hoax warning, before giving it both barrels in his critical assessment.

“It’s close to 600 rambling, repetitous words, despite claiming at the start that it didn’t have words to describe the situation. It’s ill-written, and borders on being illiterate and incomprehensible,” he wrote on the company’s blog.

“Hoaxes can be well-written, and truth can be written badly. But when everything about a written article screams, ‘Why would I believe this?’ then, to ask an obvious question, why would you believe it?”

Why indeed. Here are some true facts: Talking Angela is part of Outfit7’s Talking Tom and Friends series, which includes a number of apps based on Angela, Talking Tom, Talking Ginger and other characters.

They’ve been downloaded more than 1.5bn times since the first app was released in June 2010, with that recently-announced 230m monthly active users figure making them more popular than Twitter on smartphones.

Their developer also worked with Disney on a series of YouTube videos that have been watched more than 400m times. In other words, if Talking Angela was the cuddly face of a “pedo ring”, it’s fair to say someone would have noticed by now.

The apps haven’t been entirely without controversy: advertisements for payday lender Wonga and £4-a-week ringtone subscription services crept in to a couple of the apps in 2012 and 2013, before Outfit7 tightened up its in-app ad policies.

The Talking Angela app sells virtual coins in quantities worth up to £17.49, but as long as parents have their in-app purchase restrictions turned on, the app poses no risks to their children. Although if they watch her music video too many times, heaven knows what it’ll do to their musical sensibilities...