Privacy

Facebook Dating has announced the launch of its new “Stories” feature, which allows users of the service to include stories from their Facebook and Instagram feeds.

Stories can’t be directly created in a user’s dating profile, according to Forbes. Instead, when they are created in Facebook or Instagram, the feature allows for that content to be shared to the Facebook Dating profile. In order to access the new feature, users are required to opt-in by linking their Facebook and Instagram accounts to their dating profile. Once the accounts are linked, they can add any stories they’ve posted in the last 24 hours.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Tinder co-founder Sean Rad “irrelevant” back in 2014, but still gave him special access to user data, according to leaked emails reported by Forbes.

Zuckerberg had considered entering the online dating industry as far back as 2014, but ultimately put the decision on hold and granted the founder of Tinder, now one of the most popular dating apps in the world, special access to user data. Facebook colleagues suggested he meet with Rad, but Zuckerberg rejected the suggestion, saying in the emails, “I don’t think he’s that relevant. He probably just wants to make sure we won’t turn off their API.”

A new study by dating app Hinge shows that people are more likely to match when they have certain traits in common, rather than the old adage “opposites attract.”

According to the results of the study, people are more likely to match when they share similar backgrounds, particularly religious affiliation, education, and even their initials. The study was conducted by Jon Levy and Moran Cerf of the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, and Devin Markell of Hinge. According to an article in Business Insider, they analyzed the outcomes of more than 421 million potential matches on the app to see how similarities in certain traits affected the likelihood of people matching. This included assessing indications of users wanting to communicate outside the dating app.

Russia’s largest social media platform VKontakte is going head-to-head with Tinder and Badoo by launching its own dating app.

According to The Moscow Times, VKontakte’s Lovina is a video-centric dating app, offering a video chat option to people who like each other over the app and a “carousel” of short videos for a quick communication between random users who are browsing through the app. Executives behind Lovina say that providing video as the main way for users to connect is a better method than what traditional dating apps like Tinder offer, because video is much more revealing than photos or a written profile. Plus, there’s less chance of someone faking a video compared to photos.

Image: Facebook

Facebook Dating made its much-anticipated debut in the US on September 5th, but concerns about its privacy issues have overshadowed the excitement in media coverage of the app.

Facebook was recently ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to pay about $5 billion in fines for privacy lapses, including its maligned partnership with Cambridge Analytica leading up to the 2016 elections. And most recently, the Attorneys General of eight different states have launched an anti-trust investigation of the company, specifically concerning the company’s privacy practices and purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Still, Facebook Dating is betting on its wealth of personal user data as a competitive advantage for creating better matches to directly compete with apps like Tinder. (Match Group saw its shares fall 5 percent on the day Facebook Dating was launched, a sign of investor concerns about the new competition.)

Phone numbers linked to the Facebook accounts of more than 419 million users have been found online thanks to an insecure server.

According to TechCrunch, the server contained records from multiple databases, including 133 million records on Facebook users in the United States, 18 million records of users in the United Kingdom, and over 50 million records on users in Vietnam. Each record contained a user’s Facebook ID - a unique number associated with every Facebook account, which can easily be used to ascertain the account owner’s name - as well as the phone number listed on the account. Some records also contained the user’s name, gender and location by country.

The server was not protected with a password, allowing anyone to find and access the database. Sanyam Jain, a security researcher from the non-profit organization GDI Foundation, discovered the database and reached out to TechCrunch when he was unable to identify the owner. TechCrunch confirmed the authenticity of a number of records in the database, but was also unable to find the owner.