Dating Sites Reviews

Huggle Marketing Team

Image: BusinessCloud

While Bumble battles Match Group over intellectual property, another women-led dating app is celebrating a more positive 2018. Huggle, a British friendship and dating service launched in 2016, and its all-female marketing team has been acquired by Badoo.

Huggle matches users based on the places they love to visit. Simply indicate what you’re looking for – a date or a friend – and your search preferences, including your ideal age range and how many places you must have in common. Huggle uses GPS to automatically check you into locations you visit and notifies you of profiles that share your interests.

Founders Stina Sanders and Valerie Stark believe this approach to dating offers a more effective way to assess compatibility.

The dating app world has once again been hit with a privacy scandal. DC-based developer Trevor Faden revealed a sweeping security flaw in Grindr’s code, a glitch he says has the potential to expose sensitive information of more than 3 million daily users.

According to Faden, Grindr attaches a list of restricted profiles to each user’s account to prevent the app from displaying a profile after the user has blocked them. The list would normally remain invisible, but a loophole makes it possible to retrieve the list from Grindr’s code, thereby granting someone access to the names of every account that has blocked them.

Faden launched a website tool called C*ckBlocked that allowed users to retrieve their blocked lists by entering their Grindr username and password. Nearly 50,000 signed up, and once they did so, Faden was able to gain access to a cache of other personal information that is not publicly available on Grindr profiles, including unread messages, email addresses, deleted photos, and location data -- even for users who opted out of making their location public.

Flashback: remember that classic movie moment when Indiana Jones arrives at the cliff in his search for the Holy Grail? To complete his quest, Indy has to step off, blindly and unquestioningly.

Clearly, stepping off that nice, safe ledge doesn’t seem to be in his best interest (though it may be in ours... did you see “Kingdom Of the Crystal Skull”? Not good.)

Indy is facing a challenge that requires him to go against every instinct for his immediate safety and well-being… that he take a literal “leap of faith” to achieve his goal. And, when it comes to overcoming the biggest obstacle facing most men on the quest for love, same thing goes...

That obstacle is the idea of SACRIFICE.

Bumble has filed a $400 million lawsuit against Match Group, the parent company of popular dating apps such as Tinder, OkCupid, and Match. Bumble accused Match Group of interfering with its business operations, including stealing trade secrets and hurting the company’s chance to sell equity investments, according to reports from CNN Tech and Recode.

The Bumble lawsuit follows a previous lawsuit filed by Match Group against Bumble two weeks prior. Match Group accused the female-friendly dating app of patent infringement, specifically in regard to its swiping technology, stating that it is virtually identical to Tinder.

Bumble initially responded to the lawsuit with a post on its website, stating: “We swipe left on your attempted scare tactics, and on these endless games. We swipe left on your assumption that a baseless lawsuit would intimidate us. Given your enduring interest in our company, we expected you to know us a bit better by now.”

Facebook has come under fire, with many longtime users debating whether or not to delete their accounts, rather than make their personal information vulnerable to third parties. But something you might not have considered, brought to light by a reporter from Mashable, is how deleting Facebook might affect your love life.

Many dating apps rely on Facebook to verify profile information – that is, to make sure you really are a person and not a bot or an advertisement. With this in mind, many apps require that you use your Facebook account to login, including Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and other really popular apps.

Research firm Cambridge Analytica was accused of hijacking data from 50 million Facebook users and using the data to influence the 2016 U.S. election. This information breach was made possible because Facebook relies on third parties for ad revenue, and also partners with research firms like Cambridge Analytica, which leaves its platform open to security problems. Facebook maintains it didn’t know about the information grab, though evidence has come to light via whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who developed the strategy for hijacking and using the data to create targeted political profiles of Americans.

Worried about finding a date for your next event, a wedding, or even a dinner party? Apply to Date is a new dating platform that wants to help you put the word out, and like The Bachelor, encourages other seeking singles to compete for a chance to date you.

Similar to networking apps like LinkedIn, the platform lets you build a sharable web page (like a resume) that allows people to submit applications to date you. You can add your social media, including tweets, Instagram bios, and Snapchat stories on your webpage profile, according to website Mashable.

Apply to Date was created by Lucy Guo, who was looking for a date to her company’s office party and grew tired of swiping and messaging over apps like OkCupid and Tinder. Seeking a new strategy, she turned to her own personal networks, and eventually created a webpage asking people to submit their applications to go on a date with her. She was surprised when she received over 250 applications, and some from former friends she knew back in middle school.