Bumble is finally catching up with competitor Tinder with a new ID verification feature as dating app users urge for more safety measures. In addition to Bumble launched a new ID verification feature as dating app users urge for more safety measures.
Bumble is finally catching up with competitor Tinder with a new ID verification feature as dating app users urge for more safety measures.
In addition to ID verification, the company also released three more features, including a feature that flags inappropriate messages in chat before users hit send and the ability to share date details with friends. Bumble also launched a “Discover” page dedicated to helping users find matches with similar interests.
Bumble’s new verification feature lets users submit a picture of a government-issued ID to authenticate their identity and earn a badge for their profile. This allows users to sort profiles according to those who are ID verified and also to ask their matches to complete the verification process.
My now long standing belief is that dating apps should be nationalised. It makes so much sense from the point of running a state that it’s hard to argue against. Give people free Tinder and get free votes lol.
I would rather not have the state sit on a huge database of people’s sexual orientation and other preferences, thank you very much.
But they do sit on that database of sexual preferences already because they run the registry office. I want the state to know my blood type and other details because state is supposed to provide basic public services and infrastructure. But yeah, if your government is no longer accountable then that’s the priority always.
Explain to me how running the registry office gives them nearly as much info about people’s preferences as a dating app does. They may know who people are married to and if they have children. From that they might have a rough idea if someone is straight or not and that’s about it. They don’t know if some who’s in a heterosexual marriage is actually bisexual or even uses the marriage as a socially accepted front to hide being gay from their family. The state has no idea where an umarried person lies on the spectrum from aromantic-asexual to bouncing from orgy to orgy on a daily basis. They don’t know if someone is into BDSM, roleplay, doing it outdoors or threesomes. They also rarely know much about non-sexual hobbies.
All those things may show up in dating site profiles or if not there, in the private messages sent between users. And this is not even about a government not being trustworthy now. Anything that gets put in such a site will stay there for the foreseeable time and even the most stable democracy might be just one freak election away from having a weirdo in power who thinks that people who like sex with their socks on don’t deserve health insurance.
Of course that’s also a risk with private dating platforms but at least for those the government would have to subpoena this kind of data from them instead of having it always available without the public even knowing if and what they’re analyzing.
If you don’t have a government that can be held accountable to some level of trust, then what you have isn’t a government it’s tyranny.
Seems naive to me. The question is not whether your government has or can get that kind of information if it wants to (the gestapo had little trouble figuring out things as personal as that without any help from an app) the question is whether your government would lose the cost-benefit analysis if it was ever found to be using such information. You have to hold them accountable and keep their activities in the open so that accessing that information is as close to zero value to them as it can be and they have no incentive to try to get it because people will be able to find out if they do.
“Who watches the watchers?” We all do. At least we’re supposed to. If you don’t trust your government, priority 1 is fix your government, you’re way beyond anything a dating app’s data can be expected to help with. You’re not going to be any safer from an unaccountable government because you denied them access to a dating app.
As said: it’s not just the current government. As soon as the data is on a government server, it’s every single government for the rest of my life. And that’s a gamble I wouldn’t be willing to take.
And there’s a big difference between a police agency spending lots and lots of time and money to get to the people they’re interested in (gestapo, stasi, whatever) and them already having the data and being able to filter by whatever criteria they want at zero extra cost within seconds.
You’re treating your government like it’s your enemy. If that’s the case then you should obviously focus on fixing whatever caused this. It’s worth it because when that’s done we can have governments providing public services again.
When it comes to my data, I treat everyone like they’re my enemy. Some of those enemies I do have to trust with parts of my data, otherwise I couldn’t live a normal life but I still would want to avoid giving a single entity (especially one that literally has power over people) too much at once.
Also, I do live in a country with plenty of public services and a more or less functioning government. Still, 20.8% voted for literal Nazis in February and no matter how often I vote for someone more sensible and how many protests I join, that probably won’t make those people less hateful.
I wouldn’t give my data to a neoliberal government because that’s not that much different from giving it to Google but maybe one day, once the dust settles. I don’t want to live in this much anxiety and it seems to be an issue for you too.
Nope Nope Nope. I do not want the government having that data. Knowing our governments, they will contract this to third parties who will almost certainly sell that data.
I also do not want elected politicians having the power to shape relationships and sexuality of the population to that degree. Too much centralised power.
I know this is my most crackpot take and I usually ease people into the concept by listing increasingly novel business types that need to be nationalised :P
I’m putting this in the air so that people can start thinking about what a modern services could be provided by a healthy social democratic system. If I can convince capitalists that nationalising card processing is beneficial to everyone then one day I’ll convince y’all Valve needs to be converted into a non-profit.
I’d much sooner see electricity and telecom nationalized. Dating apps are just a racket and unnecessary.
I agree in regards to priority obviously but imagine that you have a dating app that doesn’t exist to extract every last cent out of you and is ran by people who are graded by amount of successful matches. There’s a huge crisis of solitude among younger people and technology is not the only reason for it. It can help a bit though.
The last time I used a dating app was 2016. There’s no authenticity there. I remember being on the porch with my girlfriend and us roasting people on Tinder. It’s a farce.
Mine was 2018 and I’m still with that girl I met on Tinder. Most of my age group met their partners there but there’s also no denying those apps are losing relevance. They worked for a time (although they always sucked for men), that is until inevitable enshittification.
They never worked for me, though one friend now has two kids with the woman he met off Tinder and married.
Part of the issue is they’re targeted at vanilla people looking to start families, which OK, I guess, if you want to bring kids into the world in this political and environmental situation, go for it. Shows a total lack of humanity, but people gonna fuck. Getting fixed is a thing.
The sole fact that people looking for long term relationships resort to Tinder is an example of how underserved that market is, and that’s because there’s too little money to make there. It’s more profitable to string people along with subscriptions and buy competition just to turn them into more Tinder clones.
People still make families even if they don’t have children anymore. People are also more likely to have kids when their life is safe and stable and having a partner definitely helps.
I mean, I do have two ex-wives.