You thought Twitter was bad enough, right? A swirling, infinite maelstrom of opinion (some of it good, loads of it bad), abuse and information. You’re kind of already rated on Twitter – by your followers and your favs. But two women are launching Peeple, an app that actually lets you score people out of ten and review them. People will do it to you, too.

When it launches – sometime in late November – you’ll be able to assign reviews and terrible ratings to everyone you know: your shitty ex, the annoying guy who sits opposite you at work, that dickhead from school you just can’t get out of your head.

The worst part: if you want to keep as far away from the bullshit as possible? You can’t. There’s no opting out. Once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there for good, unless you violate the site’s terms of service in some way. You can’t delete bad or biased reviews, of course. Which is unfortunate since every review is just a person’s perception of you.

The founders, Nicole McCullough and Julia Cordray – two white, attractive, tanned American women, no less – see no issue with it. “People do so much research when they buy a car or make those kinds of decisions,” said Cordray. “Why not do the same kind of research on other aspects of your life.”

Don’t worry though. There are “integrity features” that mean there’ll be no shaming or bullying on this app. To review someone, you have to be 21 and have an established Facebook account and make reviews under your real name. You also have to affirm that you “know” the person in one of the three categories: personal, professional or romantic.

The moral and ethical issues are so convoluted and numerous, where do you even start? It’s surely a breeding ground for sociopathic behaviour, bullying, public shaming and stalking?

For me, the most fundamental problem with Peeple is glaringly obvious. When someone has said something cruel or worse untrue, about me on the internet, it’s sometimes easy to brush off. When it’s someone you know, who has met you in person? More difficult. Going through a period of bad mental health or a breakup, say? Those opinions on you or your work start adding up and the smallest comment can start to shift your whole sense of self, no matter how centred you think you are.

Maybe that’s just my sensitivity to the issue, but I’d bet there’s no one out there that wouldn’t be affected by seeing one-star reviews of themselves in some way. 

My concern would be for those with mental health issues; this app would be hugely detrimental to recovery. For teens, women, anyone, really: in a dystopian world where this app really took off, who knows how this could affect the mental health of society as a whole. Gonna give Peeple one star.