Respect, Trust, and Scale: A Note to Our Community

A few weeks ago Be My Eyes reached a major milestone — one million blind and low vision users and over 10 million volunteers.

A volunteer helps someone check an expiry date. 

A caller gets quick support navigating a screen. 

A small, human connection makes a big difference.

These moments are powerful precisely because they are respectful and built on trust.

Recently, we’ve seen concerns about volunteers sharing videos of their calls or experiences on social media. While this is a rare occurrence — fewer than 0.002% of our call volumes (meaning that out of 1.5 million calls, there would be 30 instances of this) – assisting a blind person should never be performative entertainment or “good social content.” One of our blind employees compared this to “The Truman Show” — a movie about a man who discovers his entire life has been televised without his consent, with everyone around him in on it. It feels horrible. Posting a “look how cool it was to help a blind person” video is dehumanizing, and we need to acknowledge and address that.

So first, let’s be clear: this behavior is not acceptable and is a violation of our Terms of Service.

Second, the Be My Eyes platform provides a number of security features about which some of our users may not be aware. Be My Eyes Groups for example allows users to define their own trusted groups of individuals – perhaps their friends or family members – for sensitive or private call topics. But the hard part of some of these volunteer video posts is that almost all feature recording via a separate device, completely outside of our app experience. So a volunteer may have a friend or a separate camera recording the interaction. This makes technological “in-app policing” of this ineffective.

Third, we have and will continue to issue takedown requests when we discover posts like these. Social media companies are often slow to act and sometimes don’t respond at all, but we occasionally have success. We remove and ban volunteers when we can connect a post to a specific account. We also continue to educate volunteers, and wrote about this issue in our most recent volunteer newsletter — something we will repeat.

But clearly, there is more we can do. We continue, and indeed are increasing, our social media monitoring on this issue. We are also constantly evaluating additional technological and human solutions and will report back.

In the interim, let’s work together to attack this. When we become aware of a post like this, we will act. You can also help us if you want. If you become aware of a post like this that violates our terms,  please notify us at [email protected]. When we receive these reports, we will investigate and a) issue takedown requests; b) attempt to identify the volunteer in our system and warn and/or ban them; and c) when possible, comment on the post directly, noting that it violates our terms of service.

But let’s be honest with each other. We are not going to be perfect here. We are a rapidly growing community of more than 11 million people, and any group of that size will have issues and individuals who make poor choices. But by working together, we can mitigate and minimize those issues.

To our blind and low-vision community: we continue to listen and learn. We appreciate you holding us accountable. And we’re committed to continuous improvement.

To our volunteers: Your generosity is what makes this platform extraordinary. Respecting boundaries is part of that generosity.

And to everyone watching this space: When you operate at a global scale like we do, even rare issues can become visible and important. What matters is the response — and we’re committed to responding with clarity and accountability, and a passion for doing better every day.