Dating Services

The Australian Consumer Agency Choice has filed an official complaint against popular dating app Tinder for secret multiple pricing levels for its Tinder Plus premium service based on a user’s personal data, including gender, sexual preference, and age.

The complaint was filed with ACCC, the national consumer commission in Australia, according to Mashable. It’s been no secret that Tinder has charged higher prices for Tinder Plus to users over the age of 30, but this is the first time the public has learned of multi-level pricing based on personal data, and the wide range of pricing – from AUD$6.99 to AUD$34. Tinder offered no transparency about their pricing up front, so many users are probably still unaware they are being charged more if they are over 30, or LQBTQ+, or if they are male, for example.

Match Group announced that it had exceeded Wall Street revenue expectations for Q2 despite concern over drops in paying subscribers and a la carte services in April, as coronavirus began to spread through the U.S. The company also saw its stock tick up in value immediately following this news.

Match Group reported second quarter earnings that grew 15% year over year, and an 18% increase in subscribers year over year. Their earnings report also shows an increase in subscribers and downloads over pre-pandemic levels, and according to Business Insider, paid subscriptions are also back to the same level as before. 

Match Group, parent company of popular dating app Tinder, confirmed to Tech Crunch that the new premium service Tinder Platinum will be launching in Q4 of this year.

Tinder already offers two VIP tiers of service: Plus and Gold. There has been speculation for weeks about Platinum after a UK-based user said an offer popped up for the exclusive service as he was logged in over the web, but he wasn’t able to upgrade.

Tinder CEO Jim Lanzone

Popular dating app Tinder announced that Jim Lanzone, the former head of CBS Interactive, has been named the company’s new CEO.

Lanzone worked at CBS for nine years, including as president and CEO of CBS Interactive. He left CBS last year to join venture-capital firm Benchmark Capital, according to Variety. He replaces Elie Seidman, who headed up OkCupid before taking over Tinder in early 2018.

Dating apps are particularly vulnerable to hackers because of both security flaws and the valuable personal information they store. OkCupid recently confirmed that it had been notified of the potential security risks of its platform and has worked to address the issue.

Luckily, the popular dating app was able to fix the security flaw in about 48 hours, and no user data was compromised. But the nature of the problem was not unique to OkCupid and could potentially put other dating apps at risk too.

According to Engadget, security research firm Checkpoint Research, announced that it had discovered several vulnerabilities in OkCupid’s mobile app and website. The company said that these flaws could have allowed hackers access to private messages and personal addresses in addition to full profile details. In fact, hackers could even send messages from those compromised users’ accounts.

Just a quick note, it looks like Mate1 Social Enterprises Inc. sometime in June has rebranded their flagship dating service Mate1, and renamed it to "eDate". There also looks to be a few design changes and feature updates as well.

All Mate1 members are now eDate members and all Mate1 links redirect to the eDate dating website.

eDate claims 46.5 million members which is up about 16 million members from 6 years ago (when it was Mate1). Mate1 launched back in 2003 and became popular fairly soon afterwards. Unfortunately though in the last 10 years with the rise of dating apps things have not turned in Mate1's favor. This is part of the reason I suspect was for the name change.

As always when a dating service closes (or has a name change) we have left our old Mate1 review up for those who wish to read it. In the future we may plan to do a review of eDate but for now we will hold off and see how it does.