Hinge Rolls Out Selfie Video Verification

Dating app Hinge announced that it will be rolling out a video verification feature to combat fake accounts and scammers, a problem for dating apps in general.

“Selfie Verification” prompts Hinge users to upload a video of themselves, and the app will confirm that the person in the video matches the photos posted to their profile. When the profile is verified, they receive a “Verified” badge. Selfie verification isn’t required, but if users want the badge they have to complete the process.

Hinge told Wired that the verification process is a combination of machine learning and human oversight that will “compare facial geometries from the video selfie to photos on the user’s profile.”

Notably, Wired was the first to report on the new feature, following its report on the proliferation of fake accounts on Hinge, as told by a reporter who set up a profile on the dating app. People often set up fake accounts to scam people out of money, and while romantic schemes often target older daters, younger daters are not immune. “Pig butchering” scammers target younger daters who are tricked into investing money into fake cryptocurrency platforms.

Since the pandemic began, dating app usage has soared, but so have scammers and new ways to cheat people. In fact, the FTC earlier this year issued a warning to singles using online dating apps after users reported losing almost $547 million just last year from online dating scams.

Hinge isn’t the first app to offer some type of photo verification on its platform. Other Match Group apps Tinder and Plenty of Fish, both of which struggled with fake accounts, offered a similar AI-based feature. Hinge is the latest to offer one.

“As romance scammers find new ways to defraud people, we are committed to investing in new updates and technologies that prevent harm to our daters,” Jarryd Boyd, director of brand communications for Hinge, said in a statement.

Critics have said that using biometric data for facial recognition can be invasive and problematic, and as one privacy expert Wired spoke with pointed out. It can also be outsmarted by other technologies on the rise. “While [facial recognition] seems to be working for now, with looming advances in deepfakes, I’m not sure this method will be effective for long,” privacy and security researcher Maggie Oates said. “Liveness detection will be a little harder to spoof, depending on how complex the algorithms are under the hood.”

According to Wired, Boyd had not responded to the question of whether the company would retain videos used for the verification feature, but after further research we found Hinge help articles stating that the underlying facial recognition information or “template” is not kept beyond the Selfie Verification process (which is usually complete within 24 hours). The video selfie is also not kept.

Hinge will begin rolling out the new feature in November, and by December, Selfie Verification should be available to all Hinge users where the app is active, which includes people in the US, UK, Canada, India, Australia, Germany, France, among more than a dozen other countries.