Social Networks

Let’s face it – our information is out there digitally for all the world to see, or at least those who are interested in Googling our names. But we like to know what kind of privacy controls are still in place for our social media accounts. We don’t want Facebook sharing our posts with just anyone, and perhaps you keep your Instagram account private, too.

But what happens when Facebook starts to encroach on what you like to keep separate? For example, Facebook has a “suggested friends” page where it connects you with people in your social circles – maybe someone you knew back in high school or through a previous employer, and you would like to friend him/her. But what happens when the suggested friend is someone you don’t care to see again – say a Tinder date gone wrong?

Apparently, this is happening more and more, but strangely, no one really knows why. News website Motherboard investigated the link between Facebook and dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid, to see where the connection lies and if they are sharing information unbeknownst to their users.

According to Motherboard, Tinder, OkCupid and Facebook all deny sharing information with each other. Plus, most of these unwanted contacts that are suggested to Facebook users share no Facebook friends nor do they have a shared workplace history or any other connection besides being a potential or previous date.

So exactly how are these apps and Facebook tracking movement (and connections) we don’t necessarily want them to see? Shouldn’t your online dating life be kept separate from your social media circles until you meet someone special and YOU want to include them in your circles? Probably the last person you want to see as a Facebook friend suggestion is your one-night stand from two weeks ago or the date who stood you up.

So why does this keep happening? The answers are unclear. As the companies deny sharing information, there are other ways that your connections can leave a digital trail that makes its way to Facebook.

One such way is through your phone. If you message one of your dates, even if you don’t save the contact information, depending on your Facebook settings the service is able to pull contacts you have messaged and called on your phone to help expand your social circles. Motherboard found one such notice from Facebook while testing this out. The article says: “Facebook does say it bases its suggestions in part on ‘imported contacts,’ but this is something users have to opt into on the mobile app or desktop... I don’t ever remember agreeing to import my contacts, and yet when I checked my “invite history” page I had 900+ contacts saved, apparently were continuously syncing and updating, that I promptly removed. Facebook warned this could make my friend suggestions ‘less relevant.’”

Another reason could lie in Facebook searches. Chances are before a date you want to look up some information about a person over social media, doing due diligence to get to know the person you were about to meet. Perhaps you searched for them on Facebook, which would mean they could show up as a suggested friend – after all, Facebook knows you looked for them, not that you were interested in dating them.

At any rate, these digital connections will continue to increase, so it’s important to be prepared to see people you may not want in your suggested circles. If nothing else, just delete.

Practically every business is expected to have a social media presence in 2015. When your business is a digital one, that pressure doubles. When your target audience is millennials, it triples. Dating services are all about helping people make social connections, but how socially savvy are they on their own profiles?

Digiday used proprietary data from two social media analytics firms, Unmetric and Socialbakers, to pit seven dating apps against each other in the battle for most effective social media strategy. Tinder, OkCupid, Hinge, Match.com, Zoosk, Coffee Meets Bagel and Bumble were put to the test in several different categories.

Number Of Fans

With over 13 million million Facebook likes, Zoosk has the largest social media fan base. Match and Tinder follow with over 827,000 and 369,000 fans, respectively. Twitter shows similar stats. Zoosk has the most followers by far at over 350,000. Match comes in second, with 65,000, and Tinder in third, with over 56,000.

Although Tinder currently has the smallest fan base, it's also the most rapidly growing. The game-changing dating app saw its fan base grow 228 percent between January and October 2015.

Geographical Popularity

Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Match and Zoosk all have an international crop of users, but Tinder and Zoosk are the most diverse on social. In fact, the majority of Zoosk's Facebook fans are international.

Other services proved to be particularly popular in specific countries. Hinge is big in India, while Match is favored by Canadians and Tinder has won over Brazilian singles.

Engagement Level

Zoosk is the most prolific poster on social media. The company published 226 posts between January and October, and received the most likes and comments. Despite Zoosk's high volume, Tinder took the top spot for highest average engagement and most posts shared by fans.

Bumble is a relative newcomer to the dating world, but already it's showing promise on social. The app saw over 3,000 interactions with fans on Facebook between July and October. The numbers are expected to grow.

Number Of Fan Posts And Mentions

Match.com's users are the most likely to talk about it on Facebook. More than 9,000 messages were posted to Match's wall between January and October. Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel come next. Neither Tinder nor OkCupid had user posts on their Facebook walls. Their page settings most likely do not allow it.

Tinder leads the number of mentions on Twitter, perhaps because Twitter's audience skews younger than Facebook and Tinder attracts a similarly youthful user base. The app is followed by Zoosk and Match.com, which come in second and third with around 8,000 and 2,000 mentions apiece.

Popular dating apps like Tinder and Grindr have a reputation of being so-called "hook-up" apps. While more and more people are turning to dating apps to meet singles for long-term love and/ or a casual affair, this trend appears to coincide with a rise in the rates of syphilis and HIV, too.

Public health officials in Rhode Island released a health report last week stating that there has been a 79% rise in syphilis cases in the state between 2013 and 2014, and that it’s attributable in part to the use of social media and dating apps to arrange casual or anonymous hookups. People having unprotected sex, multiple sex partners, and having sex under the influence of drugs and alcohol were also cited as reasons for the increase in STDs.

“These new data underscore the importance of encouraging young people to begin talking to a doctor, nurse, or health educator about sexual health before becoming sexually active and especially after becoming sexually active,” Rosemary Reilly-Chamma of the Rhode Island Department of Education said in the report.

A rise in STDs, particularly HIV and syphilis, were also reported in New York, Utah, and Texas, where officials have warned of increased risk of transmission. The New York City Health Department announced earlier this year that men in the neighborhood of Chelsea had the highest infection rate of syphilis in the country.

Anindya Ghose, co-author of a study that monitored the rise of STDs along with the launch of Craiglist personals ads, believes that online dating apps have had a similar effect. "Basically what the Internet does is makes it a lot easier to find a casual partner," he told VICE News. "Without the Internet you'd have to put effort into casual relationships, chatting with someone at the bar or hanging out in places, but these platforms make it a lot more convenient and easy. That's essentially what the primary driver is."

Others disagree, citing a lack of education and resources, especially for young people, the largest group at risk. They argue that community health providers, doctors, and even schools should educate people about the risks of not using condoms and other protection when engaging in casual sex. Access to condoms and affordable healthcare are two big concerns.

Social media and dating apps make it easier to meet people, but they didn’t create the problem of STD risk. They magnified a problem that already existed – casual sexual encounters without adequate knowledge of safety and protection leave people vulnerable to risk.

A recent article in The New York Times highlighted the increased popularity of dating apps, and how one in particular – Tinder – has changed the online dating game.

The proof is in the numbers. According to the most recent Pew study, 11% of American adults have used an online dating site or app. Back in 2005 when dating sites were becoming more popular, 44% of Americans felt this was a good way to meet people. But in 2013, thanks to dating apps like Tinder, 59% agree that online dating is a good way to meet.

Tinder claims it matches more than 12 million people per day, and processes more than a billion matches daily as well. This has sparked a surge of dating apps to flood the market, some of which have succeeded in growing a steady user base based on differentiating themselves from the so-called "hook-up app" (although utilizing the same Facebook profile-validation system). Hinge and Coffee Meets Bagel limit the number of matches per day, forcing users to consider a match rather than mindlessly swiping left and right. The League markets its clientele – upscale and educated – to attract new users. And apps like LuLu and Bumble are female-centric, allowing the women to call the shots on which guys can message them – as well as how their dates rate according to other female daters.

The New York Times article suggests that Tinder's success might have caused some traditionally successful online dating sites such as Match.com to put more research and development into their mobile apps. But essentially, it was only a matter of time before smartphones – which are now used to access everything from email to Facebook to TV shows at any time, from anywhere – would be a good way to meet potential dates. After all, our phones are so much more accessible than our laptops. (Plus, Tinder’s game-like interface is much more fun, compared to slogging through endless questions and profile descriptions on an online dating site.)

Amarnath Thombre, president of Match.com in North America, says there has been a 35 percent increase in the people who use the Match app each month, and a 109 percent increase in the number of people who use only the app to log in to their Match account every month.

For now, daters seem to be choosing convenience over everything else – which might not be a bad idea. Dating apps help people get to the meetings and messages with their matches a lot more quickly than the algorithm process touted by traditional dating sites. But are daters wasting more time because filters aren’t in place?

One thing is for sure: dating apps are here to stay, until something more convenient comes along.

Mark Zuckerberg has made plenty of comments over the years about the increasingly public way in which we live (something he seems to be an outspoken advocate of). There was also the recent controversy over Facebook's nearly-enacted real name policy. So it certainly comes as a surprise that a site so anti-anonymity has just joined forces with the Web’s most anonymous network.

Wired reports that Facebook launched “a Tor hidden service, a version of its website that runs the anonymity software Tor.” The new site can only be accessed by users running the Tor software, which bounces their connections “through three extra encrypted hops to random computers around the Internet, making it far harder for any network spy observing that traffic to trace their origin.”

Before you get excited that you'll finally be safe from Facebook's prying eyes, know that even Tor users are not anonymous to Facebook itself. But Tor can now protect your identity from every other threat to your security and privacy you may encounter while liking the latest clickbait from Upworthy. “You get around the censorship and local adversarial surveillance,” explains former Tor developer Runa Sandvik, “and it adds another layer of security on top of your connection.”

Prior to this development, Facebook made it difficult for Tor users to access the site – sometimes even blocking their connections altogether. Because Tor users appear to log in from IP address all over the world, Facebook's security infrastructure often mislabeled them as potential attacks from hackers. According to the Tor blog, “a high volume of malicious activity across Tor exit nodes triggered Facebook's site integrity systems which are designed to protect people who use the service.”

Now Facebook plans to be friendly to the odd, international connections that were formerly causing problems, and Sandvik says it provides an extra layer of security beyond what running Tor on the user’s end alone can offer. “When both the user and Facebook are running Tor,” explains Wired, “the traffic doesn’t leave the Tor network until it’s safely within Facebook’s infrastructure.” That means there's no opportunity for outsiders to spy on unencrypted traffic or decrypt it themselves.

Over the past few years, SSL encryption has become the standard for major sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter looking to protect their users’ privacy. Sandvik believes Facebook’s Tor hidden service may mean that Tor will become the next basic privacy protection leading tech companies will be expected to offer their users.

For more on this social network you can read our review of Facebook.

You could call Facebook many things, but 'anonymous' isn't anywhere on the list. In fact, it's pretty much exactly the opposite. A social network is social. It's about connecting with others and sharing (or creating, as some would argue) your identity. It's as public as it gets.

And yet, Facebook is in the process of boldly going where it has never gone before: anonymity. The New York Times has reported that Facebook is building a stand-alone mobile app that “allows users to interact inside of it without having to use their real names.”

“The point,” the NYT continues, “is to allow Facebook users to use multiple pseudonyms to openly discuss the different things they talk about on the Internet; topics of discussion which they may not be comfortable connecting to their real names.”

Little is known about the new app so far. It's unclear if it will allow anonymous photo sharing, for example, or if it will interact in any way with Facebook's main site, or how existing friend connections will be treated. It's also unclear how Facebook plans to protect against spammers and others who could exploit the anonymous service. So far, Facebook's heavily publicized real-name policy has played a large role in its strategy to prohibit abuse, so it's interesting to see the site suddenly embrace anonymity.

It's bound to come with challenges. On one hand, anonymity could allow Facebook users to be more vulnerable and form deeper connections (which is the ultimate goal of a social network, after all) than ever before. However, anonymity could instead mean never trusting what anyone says or who anyone says they are. The Internet is a notoriously harsh place, and many have attributed that harshness to anonymous usernames.

When real names are used, people are held accountable for their comments and actions. Civil discussions can occur, even around controversial subjects, because reputations are at stake. Without that in place, Facebook could see an increase in bullying, sexism, racism, homophobia, violence, and other undesirable behavior.

But there's also an argument to be made in the other direction. Perhaps not requiring users to identify themselves will make them feel more comfortable expressing controversial or unpopular opinions, or participating in conversations around sensitive or personal topics. Anonymity could be the key to more vulnerable sharing but more disruption, while authentic identity could decrease abuse while also decreasing discussion.

Facebook hopes its anonymous app can combine the best of both possibilities. They're better equipped than most to make that happen, but it won't be an easy road.

For more on this popular social network and how to use it to find dates you can read our Facebook review.