Legal

Randian Capital, an activist investor in Bumble, is urging the company to follow its “turnaround plan,” which also includes a potential sale.

The investor group spent six months analyzing Bumble’s business practices and is advocating for drastic change to be made because “the current trajectory is not working,” according to sources who spoke to Investing.com.

When asked about potential buyers, Randian mentioned one interesting company – Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and dominates the social media market. Meta is also currently the subject of an SEC investigation into the nature of its previous mergers, which are alleged to violate anti-trust laws, due to some internal correspondence among its executives.

Two major online safety groups have partnered to create a new industry standard for online dating in the wake of reports that dating app companies aren’t taking needed steps to protect users on their platforms.

The Cyber Rights Organization (CRO) and Online Dating and Discovery Association (ODDA) joined forces to educate industry leaders in different areas of safety including human rights, data privacy, and best business practices, according to DatingNews.com. The ODDA sets guidelines for dating app companies and alerts them to potential risks, while the CRO is a watchdog, and protects people who are using dating platforms.

“The alliance between CRO and ODDA is driven by mutual commitment to user safety in the digital dating sphere,” the ODDA said, according to DatingNews.com.

A vast majority of daters – 85 percent of women and 87 percent of men - want apps to verify the ages, recency of photos, and locations of potential matches.

According to a new study from TransUnion, over half of those surveyed also said that dating app profiles didn’t accurately reflect the people they met in person. Women were twice as likely to say that people lied about their age, and men were more likely to say they were a victim of a “bait and switch” according to the company’s press release. The study is entitled “The Paradox of Online Dating: Convenience vs. Connection.”

In fact, of those surveyed, more than 75 percent said they were willing to undergo background checks themselves to bring more transparency among dating app users.

An investigation into Match Group by nonprofit news organization The Markup and Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network found that the company had information about users who were reported for sexual assault, but did not ban them from its apps, publicly identify them, or report them to authorities.

This report follows the company’s ouster of CEO Bernard Kim, who was not able to turn around the company’s revenue decline over the past several quarters. He was replaced by Zillow Group Inc. co-founder Spencer Rascoff.

Now, Match Group is facing the fallout from this investigation.

Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd announced that she will be returning to the company as CEO in March.

Wolfe Herd left the position early last year and Lidiane Jones, the former CEO of Slack, took the reins at Bumble. Jones oversaw a major reboot of the app which deviated from its original female-first approach, allowing men to message women first. During her tenure, the company went through staff layoffs and a significant drop in stock value as well.

Jones said she was leaving “for personal reasons” according to The Verge.

Gay dating app Grindr has been hinting at its development of an AI wingman, but now the company is officially testing an initial model, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The WSJ interview with CEO George Arison included more details on the AI wingman, which will keep track of a user’s matches and make conversational suggestions based on messages they have had with other users. The AI bot will even recommend matches with long-term relationship potential and suggest places where they could meet.

According to Arison, down the line, the AI wingmen of Grindr users will be able to chat with each other so they can offer a “robust view” of a match before the user decides to meet in person. “Bot-to-bot conversation not only saves the humans time, it might also spot dating deal-breakers early on,” he told WSJ.