Legal

Dating app Bumble has been urging states to pass bills similar to the one it initiated in Texas, which makes it illegal for people to send unsolicited nude photos electronically. In mid-April, Virginia passed such a bill into law.

According to the new law, any adult sending an unsolicited “intimate image” electronically to another adult could be fined up to $500. The law defines intimate image as a “photo, film, video, recording, digital picture or other visual reproduction of a person 18 years of age or older who is in a state of undress so as to expose the human male or female genitals.”  

USA Today spoke with Bumble about how company's head of public policy for the Americas, Payton Iheme, reached out to Virginia Senator Jennifer McClellan for help with the legislation, since the company had success a few years ago passing a similar bill in Texas. The Virginia Senate had voted down another lewd photos bill two years before that carried criminal penalties, but since the new bill introduced civil penalties only, lawmakers felt more comfortable passing it into law.

Match Group triumphed over federal regulators in a lawsuit that would have had them pay $844 million for failing to remove fake messages and profiles from its Match dating app.

According to Bloomberg, U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade delivered the ruling and cited the Communications Decency Act, deeming Match a publisher, which means that since the company isn’t creating the profiles but instead just publishing them, they are ultimately protected from blame.  

In 2019, the FTC filed a lawsuit against Match for fraud, saying that it exposed customers to increased risk of being scammed and engaged in other deceptive and unfair practices, including tricking hundreds of thousands of consumers into buying subscriptions. According to Tech Crunch, the agency claimed Match knowingly profited from these practices, and it made deceiving users a core part of its business practices. It also said that 25 to 30 percent of registrations on Match came from scammers. 

A new Connecticut bill aiming to improve safety on dating apps just advanced from the judiciary committee to the Senate for a vote. If passed, it could set a precedent for the rest of the country.

The legislation would force online dating sites to verify the identity of users and provide that information if presented with a warrant, subpoena or court order, according to CT Insider. It would also establish new education and training programs to combat online abuse and designates “grooming” (befriending minors to abuse them) as a separate crime. The judiciary committee passed the bill at the end of March.

While there is large support for the bill from legislators and violence prevention advocates, there is some hesitation among lawmakers, including Republican state senator Craig Fishbein. He questioned how dating services would be able to verify someone’s identity or stop them from transferring an account to someone else. 

Apple has extended a new proposal to Dutch regulators, who have continued to fine the company for non-compliance with its order.

The tech giant submitted a new offer to the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) pertaining to the regulator’s order to allow dating apps to use third-party payment systems instead of forcing them to use the Apple Store, according to Tech Crunch. The ACM acknowledged receiving Apple’s proposal but shared no details publicly.

“We will now assess the substance of these proposals,” ACM said in a statement, according to Tech Crunch. “In that context, we will also sit down with various market participants. Our aim is to complete this assessment as soon as possible.”

Bumble and Match Group’s female CEOs have spoken out against new legislation in Texas banning access to abortions and have offered to cover travel costs to help employees get care in other states, and Citigroup’s female CEO has announced her company will do the same.

Over the past several months, Republican-led states including Texas have been passing an array of new extreme anti-abortion laws, including narrowing the abortion care window down to a six-week period before a woman typically knows she’s pregnant, allowing citizens to sue those who help someone get an abortion, and even outlawing abortions for ectopic pregnancies, which are not viable and put the mother at risk. States are enacting these laws in anticipation of the Supreme Court chipping away at existing protections later this year, notably Roe v. Wade.

Match Group and Bumble have headquarters in Texas, where some of the most restrictive state legislation in regard to abortion access has taken place in recent months.

Dating app Tinder said that it would be ending the controversial aged-based pricing structure for its premium service Tinder Plus by the end of the second quarter.

The news follows a recent UK study that found users were paying wildly different prices to access Tinder’s premium service, typically based on age, which raised questions about discriminatory pricing.

According to Buzzfeed, the Mozilla Foundation and Consumers International took up where the UK consumer watchdog Which? and Australian consumer advocacy organization Choice left off when they first pointed out the issue of price discrepancies on the app. The researchers at Mozilla and CI didn’t find statistically different prices based on race, gender or sexual orientation, but did find it among different age groups.