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Image: Tinder

Dating app Tinder partnered with star rapper Megan Thee Stallion for its “Put Yourself Out There” Challenge, a way to encourage Tinder users to be more authentic in their profiles. 

The promotion is helping users gear up for online dating’s most active day, the first Sunday in January also known as the dating Super Bowl, where people flock to dating apps looking for a new relationship. The campaign is to encourage people to revise their profiles to be more creative and to showcase their unique personality traits, according to Fast Company. Tinder is offering $10,000 to 100 users in categories such as most personality, most creative, most original, most real, and others.

To enter, participants must take a screenshot or video of their new profile and post it to Instagram by December 31st, tagging @Tinder, #PYOTChallenge and #contest.

Dressing up for Halloween? You might want to reconsider your scary or political-themed ensemble and go for something funny, according to a new study from Dating.com.

The dating service surveyed its users to assess the differences a Halloween costume could make in attracting potential partners. Considering this is an election year in the U.S., political costumes might be popular, but it seems the vast majority of daters – 70% of respondents - are most attracted to people wearing funny costumes. 

Cute costumes came in a distant second at 18 percent, and scary costumes third at 13 percent. Political costumes were a definite no among both men and women. They were considered the least attractive costumes for 68 percent of men and 52 percent of women. So, if you were planning on dressing as Joe Biden or Donald Trump, you might want to come up with another plan.

The Meet Group has announced that it has added a 3D face authentication-powered verification badge to its platforms. The new badge will use AI technology in authenticating that the account belongs to a real person.

The activation process begins when a user chooses the badge, prompting them to take a selfie in that moment. The AI software from FaceTec then scans and confirms the authenticity of the selfie to “confirm the user’s physical living presence, and perform age estimation” according to Mobile ID World. This is a strategy to prevent underage users and those who engage in catfishing with fake profiles from using the app.

Image: @wongmjane

Dating app Tinder is testing more new features, one of which was briefly disclosed in an earnings call earlier this year by Match Group.

The new features are described as “conversation starters” to help initiate messaging between users and to keep them more engaged. One of the features is a conversational prompt, which encourages users to respond to a question or finish a sentence so that their matches get a better idea of who they are. The second feature allows users to post photos, looping videos and other content that can only be seen by their existing matches, according to Tech Crunch. This is also intended to strike up conversations in a more personal, unique way.

A New York City task force on cyber sexual assault has discovered more than 70,000 photos of Tinder users on an online cyber-crime forum. Aaron DeVera, a member of the task force, told reporters that the images were found on a site known for trading in malicious software and that only female users appear to have been targeted.

Gizomodo was the first outlet to share the news. According to the original report, the photos were accompanied by a text file containing around 16,000 unique Tinder user IDs. Items found in the photos, like the iPhone X, and metadata indicate that many of the pictures are relatively current — some, in fact, have timestamps dated as recent as October 2019. The availability of this information to cybercriminals raises serious concerns about why it was collected and what it could be used for.

Tencent, China’s largest social networking platform and operator of the immensely popular app WeChat, has launched a new dating app that seems positioned to compete with both Tinder and Tantan, China’s most popular dating app.

Qingliao - roughly translated as “light chat” – is kind of a hybrid of different dating app features already on the market. There is no swiping, but users can choose to “like” or “pass” on a potential match by choosing an “X” or a heart. When two users are matched, they can start chatting, according to details described in South China Morning Post.