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.
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.