In what was perhaps a speed record for attempting to dismantle a product that doesn’t exist yet, angry people circulated an online petition to prevent the project, called Peeple, from ever making it to an app store. Sleuths at the website Snopes, known for debunking rumors, tried to figure out if the whole thing was an elaborate ruse. And the woman behind the app, Julia Cordray, insisted that Peeple was the real thing, and that it would proceed despite receiving a viral heap of negative reviews.
On Monday, Ms. Cordray, an entrepreneur who previously founded a recruiting website, wrote in an email that, despite the backlash, her project “will not be shamed into submission.” She said that she still planned to release the app on
iPhone and
Android in November, though the app’s Twitter account and website appeared to be offline.
A day earlier, Ms. Cordray published a post on LinkedIn saying that she received hateful messages and death threats after her project was referred to as a “terrifying Yelp for People” by The Washington Post.
The Post’s article, which used the idea for Peeple as basis for a wider commentary on the ethical boundaries of rating humans online, did not go into specifics about how Ms. Cordray’s app would work — perhaps because there appears to be no existing prototype — but did say that users could submit others for review as long as a user had a Facebook account and the subject’s cellphone number.
