Ugly Meter iPhone App, Stephen Balkam: “right on the borderline”. You a Beauty? Beast? “You’re So Ugly, You Walk by the Bathroom, Toilet Flushes”

A shocking iPhone app is becoming popularized by the media worldwide: the “Ugly Meter” iPhone App. Are you a Beauty? a Beast? the iPhone app attempts to answer that question in “humorous” ways. The applications takes a picture by scanning the faces of whoever uses it with the phone’s camera and then rates their appearance on a scale of 1 to 10. But unlike traditional apps where 10 means the most beautiful. 10 in this case, means the most possibly “ugly”. If you hit the highest score it says: “You’re so ugly, when you walk by the bathroom, the toilet flushes”. Other comments include lines like “You look like you ran a 100-yard dash in a 90-yard gym.”

Though whether or not a computer is actually capable of seeing where someone is a beauty or “beast” is debatable, many are raising objections to the iPhone app. Stephen Balkam, CEO of the Washington-based Family Online Safety Institute, says it is “right on the borderline” of inappropriateness. Though that comment is getting much press, it seems redundant: from anyone’s point of view it is of course inappropriate. But perhaps Balkam meant to say “right on the borderline of behavior we should think to have the government ban” as many groups worried about potentially self-conscious teens getting a hold of it and losing self-esteem lobby against it. Some say they may have a point, but others think it may be just more over-protective parents preventing children from living in the real world and spoiling what is a fun time for everyone else who doesn’t take a talking phone’s opinion of beauty seriously.