Safety
Safe, without your ID.
Grumble never asks for your ID, but it does give you the tools to control who reaches you, and a team that acts on reports.
If someone is in danger right now, call 000 in Australia, or your local emergency number.
Reporting something
In the app, right-click (or long-press) a message, a person or a server and choose Report. Pick what's wrong, add anything we should know, and send it.
- We let you know straight away that we've got it.
- The person you report is never told who reported them.
- Our safety team looks into it, most serious first, and tells you what we decided in the app's Safety Centre (Settings → Safety Centre).
- If you disagree with the outcome, you can ask us to look again within a month. Someone who didn't make the first decision reviews it.
- Direct messages and servers are end-to-end encrypted, so we can't read them. When you report a message, the app sends our team your copy of it (in a server, with the key to that one message, so the team can check it against what was sent).
- Report an image as an intimate image shared without consent and it's hidden from everyone straight away, until our team decides.
- We acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and resolve them within 7 days.
You can also complain about Grumble itself, for example if a safety tool isn't working or we didn't handle a report properly, with Make a complaint in the Safety Centre. If we can't sort it out, we pass it to eSafety.
No account, or suspended? Use our contact page to report illegal content, get intimate images of you taken down (hidden from everyone as soon as you send the notice, removed within 48 hours of a valid request), send a copyright notice, appeal a suspension, or ask about your data.
If we act on something of yours, we tell you what we did and why in the Safety Centre, and you can ask us to look again.
Staying in control
- Block someone
- Right-click their name and choose Block. They can't message you, call you or send you friend requests.
- Choose who can message you
- Turn off Direct messages from server members in the Safety Centre so only friends can message you, or do it for one server from that server's notification settings. People you share no server with can never message you unless you're friends.
- Choose who can add you
- In the Safety Centre, pick whether everyone, friends of friends or people in your servers can send you friend requests.
- Hide words
- List words in the Safety Centre under Hidden words, and messages with them are folded away until you click them, in servers and in encrypted DMs. The list stays on your device.
- Filter a server
- Server owners and moderators can block or flag messages with words they choose, under Server settings → AutoMod, and send alerts to a channel of their choosing. Grumble doesn't come with word lists, so each server picks its own. The checking happens in members' apps, and our server learns only which rule matched.
- Hide that you're online
- Set your status to Invisible.
- Leave
- Leave any group chat or server whenever you like.
Protection for younger people
Grumble is for people 13 and older. At sign-up, everyone picks 13 to 15, 16 or 17 or 18 or over (picking Under 13 ends sign-up), and sees the protections Australian law sets for that age group, which then apply to their account. Adults' accounts start without these limits.
- At 16 and 17, an account is open to everyone, except that its DM setting starts at friends only (RES Code 9.5). They can switch that off any time.
- At 13 to 15, accounts start private, with DMs from friends only. People can talk in servers and message others under 18. Adults can't DM, call or friend them until they turn on “My parent or carer is OK with adults contacting me” (RES Standard s18(4)(f) and (g)).
- Age-restricted channels stay closed to anyone under 18.
- Grumble never shows anyone's location.
Child safety standards
Grumble has zero tolerance for child sexual abuse and exploitation. It's banned everywhere on Grumble, encrypted DMs and servers included, whether it's real, drawn or made by AI:
- any sexual or sexualised material involving someone under 18;
- grooming, meaning trying to get sexual material or contact from anyone under 18;
- sending or showing porn or other sexual content to anyone under 18, for any reason.
Reporting it. In the app, report the message, person or server and choose Child sexual abuse or exploitation or Sexual content sent to someone under 18. Without an account, use our contact page. These reports go to the front of our safety team's queue.
What we do. We remove the material, close the accounts involved, and report it to the police, in Australia the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE). Pictures we can see, such as avatars and server icons, are compared as they're uploaded with the fingerprints of illegal files we've removed before, and so are the files in a message someone reports. Matching files are refused or removed, and our safety team is told who sent them. A search for child sexual abuse material gets a warning and where to find help, not results.
Talking to us about child safety. Our contact page reaches the safety team, including for organisations working on child safety.
Adult content
Legal adult content is fine between adults who want it, in channels marked age-restricted and in private conversations. It's never allowed where it can reach anyone under 18 or anyone who didn't ask for it, and nothing illegal is ever allowed. If you're sent sexual content you didn't want, block the sender and report the message. The details are in the Community Rules.
Turning on adult content takes two steps, Show adult content and then a confirmation. It's remembered on that device only. In the iPhone app it works differently, because Apple only lets an app show adult content you turned on outside the app. Adults switch on Allow age-restricted content on iPhone in Grumble on the web or a computer (Settings → Safety Centre). That one is kept on your account, so your iPhone can see it, until you turn it off.
Illegal material
Child sexual abuse material, terrorist material and real extreme violence are never allowed. We remove them as soon as we know about them, close the accounts involved, and report to police where the law requires. Pictures we know are illegal are blocked from being uploaded again, files in reported messages are checked the same way, and anyone who tries is reported to our safety team. A search for child sexual abuse material gets a warning and where to find help, not results. We carry out removal notices from eSafety within 24 hours.
eSafety
The eSafety Commissioner is Australia's independent regulator for online safety. eSafety helps Australians with serious online harm. It can have cyberbullying of children, serious abuse of adults, image-based abuse (intimate images shared without consent) and illegal or restricted content removed, and it oversees how online services like Grumble meet the online safety rules.
You can go to eSafety if you've reported something to us and it hasn't been dealt with, or if you're unhappy with how we handled a complaint about Grumble.