The Dat(a min)ing Game

-- By JustinFlaumenhaft - 16 Apr 2022

The Love Monopolists

In Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, Moira Weigel argues that modern dating emerged in the 19th century. According to Weigel, before the modern dating paradigm began, courtship was supervised in homes, synagogues, and other non-commercial spaces. Modern dating, she contends, “takes that process out of the home, out of supervised and mostly noncommercial spaces, to movie theaters and dance halls.” Increasingly, however, that process is supervised—supervised by online dating applications.

The worldwide online dating pool includes hundreds of millions of users. In the United States, approximately 30% of adults and 49% of individuals aged 18-29 have used dating sites or applications. And a recent study of heterosexual American couples found that 39% met online, making it the most common way of meeting among the respondents. Dating now not only takes places in commercial settings, but is intermediated by commercial forces. Online datings applications have become the primary matchmakers of modern society.

Match Group, Inc. has taken over much of the responsibility for pairing couples. The conglomerate owns over 40 distinct online dating apps—including Hinge, OKCupid, and Tinder—and upwards of 60% of the online dating market share. Some commentators argue that this level of consolidation amounts to monopolization of the dating app industry. But such arguments elide a more serious issue: who are we letting pull the strings of people’s romantic lives? And what are they doing with this power? Match Group may have monopolized the dating industry, but the dating industry is on a quest to monopolize our collective search for love.

Social Media Symbiosis

Students of this course will not be surprised to learn that there are deep connections between large social media companies and popular dating apps. The relationship between these entities is symbiotic. For example, in 2015, leaked Facebook documents revealed that the company granted Tinder, Hinge, and other popular dating apps special access to Facebook user data, even amid policy changes that excluded third party apps from this kind of access. Meanwhile, these same dating apps often ask users to build their profiles around their existing social media accounts. Social media accounts have become part of the price of admission to the online dating scene.

The consequences of this shady symbiosis is reflected in a Guardian article in which the author recounts her experience requesting access to the personal data Tinder had collected on her. Tinder responded to her request with an 800-page-long document, which included extensive information about her Facebook activity and other social media use. This disturbing dossier underscores the fact that online dating apps are not distinct from social media companies, but continuous with them. They are merely another appendage of the PwMOG? , charged with overseeing, recording, and manipulating the most intimate aspects of users’ personal lives.

The Privacy Nightmare of Online Dating Apps

Dating apps have proven to be profoundly untrustworthy stewards of their users’ personal information and romantic lives. Grindr, a dating app geared toward the LGBTQ community, is among the worst. This is especially troubling given the discrimination and hostility that the LGBTQ community faces around the world—merely being outed as a user of the app could be dangerous. Nonetheless, in 2018, Grindr faced criticism for sharing the HIV status of its users with third party companies, which the company fully admitted to doing. It shared that data along with information about users’ phone, email, and GPS location.

Additionally, shortly after the HIV status controversy, Grindr was sold to a Chinese gaming company. The US intervened and forced the gaming company to sell Grindr, for fear the acquisition would provide China with fodder for blackmailing US citizens. However, in the short time before this intervention, the company had already provided its engineers with access to user databases for several months.

Thus, Grindr not only collected users’ HIV statuses—a fact which alone is alarming— but also kept track of users’ locations and contact information, shared all of this information with third parties, and, by selling itself to a Chinese company, placed its user data firmly within reach of the Chinese government. This is just one of multiple privacy abuses perpetrated by Grindr, which has received multiple fines for mishandling user data. And Grindr is just a small node in the vast network of online dating.

The Indignity of Online Dating Apps

In her opinion piece, “You Are Now Remotely Controlled,” Shoshana Zuboff begins with an anecdote from a 1997 FTC hearing on technology, privacy, and liberty. One participant stated, “We have to decide what human beings are in the electronic age. Are we just going to be chattel for commerce?” Decades later, the online dating industry has gone to great lengths to make the fear expressed in this statement a reality.

Like Facebook or Google, the business model of dating apps are based on, as Zuboff puts it, trading in “human futures.” But the way these apps engage users and cause them to engage with others is particularly dehumanizing. Users are not only the products, but the ones selling theirselves. They are prompted to craft profiles to catch the attention of another person swiping through a catalogue of thousands of other humans. Moreover, the user interface is often deliberately made to feel like a game and keep you swiping. The purpose of all this is not to help you find love, but to keep you playing the game and boost the company’s earnings.

This set up encourages users to treat others without dignity: to view dating as online shopping and fellow daters as replaceable commodities. Nobody enjoys this, but as dating applications monopolize dating and bring more and more users into the fold, many feel that there is no alternative. Of course, people still find enjoyment and fulfillment through dating apps. But dating apps make the process a dehumanizing one in which users are spied upon, have their secrets sold, and are treated like objects.

[Word count: 999]

References

https://www.statista.com/topics/7443/online-dating/#topicHeader__wrapper https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2020/11/20/this-cuffing-season-its-time-to-consider-the-privacy-of-dating-apps/ https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-way-u-s-couples-meet https://www.nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/NYULAWREVIEW-94-4-Gilbert.pdf https://mashable.com/article/facebook-tinder-user-data-access https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/26/tinder-personal-data-dating-app-messages-hacked-sold https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/03/599069424/grindr-admits-it-shared-hiv-status-of-users https://www.techrepublic.com/article/mozilla-privacy-report-on-dating-apps-singles-out-grindr-for-serious-security-lapses/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-grindr-exclusive-idUSKCN1SS10H https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/02/grindr-sends-hiv-status-to-third-parties-and-some-personal-data-unencrypted/ https://www.datatilsynet.no/en/regulations-and-tools/regulations/avgjorelser-fra-datatilsynet/2021/gebyr-til-grindr/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/15/grindr-final-gdpr-fine/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/surveillance-capitalism.html

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, JustinFlaumenhaft
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.