General News

Harvard Geneticist George Church

Harvard Geneticist George Church, known for his work on reversing aging, has now turned his efforts to building a dating app that eliminates diseases by matching partners based on DNA compatibility. It works like this: when two users have a low likelihood of passing diseases onto their children, they’ll be matched.

The move has drawn a lot of controversy, namely because of its nod towards eugenics, or “good birth,” an idea popularized under Nazi Germany in the 1930s to eliminate “bad genes” through selective breeding. Church however, argues that the goal is to eliminate disease by pairing people who have the least amount of risk of creating offspring with illnesses or disabilities.

A revealing report published by ProPublica found that Match Group did not conduct background checks on users of their popular free platforms, including Tinder, Plenty of Fish, and OkCupid, leaving their members vulnerable to sexual assault.

Columbia Journalism Investigations analyzed more than 150 incidents of sexual assault among people who met through dating apps over the last decade, ProPublica reported. Most met their matches through Match Group apps. The researchers discovered that registered sex offenders were using Match Group apps like Tinder and went on dates with women who had no idea, because while Match Group conducts background checks for paid apps like Match, they don’t for their free apps.

Image: Business Wire

Spark Networks announced that Eric Eichmann will take over as CEO of Spark Networks, replacing Jeronimo Folgueira.

“I could not be more excited to join Spark at this time,” Eichmann said in a statement, published in Yahoo! Finance News. “Spark has a tremendous brand portfolio to help people find love across the globe…I look forward to working with the great team at Spark and leading the next chapter of its development.”

The New eHarmony Homepage

On November 4th eHarmony released a massive update to their dating service. Both the website and dating apps (iOS and Android) received a complete overhaul.

It was just a year ago that eHarmony was purchased by Germany's Parship Elite Group. At that time Parship Elite Group planned to move eHarmony to their existing platform which currently runs their other dating platforms (most are in Europe). An interview with Tim Schiffers, the CEO of Parship Elite Group stated that the migration could take as long as a year but would be well worth it since they have invested a lot in their technical setup to ensure ease of maintenance and feature upgrades.

Tinder claims to have made about 30 billion matches to date over its highly successful app (about 26 million per day, according to an article in The Daily Mail), but it seems only 50 percent of them ever meet one of their matches face-to-face. In order to increase their chances of meeting a date IRL, users have to match with far more people than they actually expect to meet, according to the study.

On average, when participants were asked how many matches they had actually met up with in real life, men averaged 1.9 partners and women 2.2 partners, despite matching with 111 and 124 respectively.

A team from Norwegian University of Science and Technology surveyed 269 students in Norway who were all Tinder users, and 60 percent of those surveyed were women.

Dating.com Group is expanding its suite of dating apps by acquiring Dil Mil, a San Francisco-based dating app that is popular among ex-pats from India and South Asian countries, according to Tech Crunch.

South Asian ex-pats are less interested in arranged marriages, and have turned to dating apps to help find love in the U.S. However, most popular American dating apps like Tinder and OkCupid aren’t culturally appealing to this group of daters, who are more conservative and traditional in their approach to dating.