General News

You could call Facebook many things, but 'anonymous' isn't anywhere on the list. In fact, it's pretty much exactly the opposite. A social network is social. It's about connecting with others and sharing (or creating, as some would argue) your identity. It's as public as it gets.

And yet, Facebook is in the process of boldly going where it has never gone before: anonymity. The New York Times has reported that Facebook is building a stand-alone mobile app that “allows users to interact inside of it without having to use their real names.”

“The point,” the NYT continues, “is to allow Facebook users to use multiple pseudonyms to openly discuss the different things they talk about on the Internet; topics of discussion which they may not be comfortable connecting to their real names.”

Little is known about the new app so far. It's unclear if it will allow anonymous photo sharing, for example, or if it will interact in any way with Facebook's main site, or how existing friend connections will be treated. It's also unclear how Facebook plans to protect against spammers and others who could exploit the anonymous service. So far, Facebook's heavily publicized real-name policy has played a large role in its strategy to prohibit abuse, so it's interesting to see the site suddenly embrace anonymity.

It's bound to come with challenges. On one hand, anonymity could allow Facebook users to be more vulnerable and form deeper connections (which is the ultimate goal of a social network, after all) than ever before. However, anonymity could instead mean never trusting what anyone says or who anyone says they are. The Internet is a notoriously harsh place, and many have attributed that harshness to anonymous usernames.

When real names are used, people are held accountable for their comments and actions. Civil discussions can occur, even around controversial subjects, because reputations are at stake. Without that in place, Facebook could see an increase in bullying, sexism, racism, homophobia, violence, and other undesirable behavior.

But there's also an argument to be made in the other direction. Perhaps not requiring users to identify themselves will make them feel more comfortable expressing controversial or unpopular opinions, or participating in conversations around sensitive or personal topics. Anonymity could be the key to more vulnerable sharing but more disruption, while authentic identity could decrease abuse while also decreasing discussion.

Facebook hopes its anonymous app can combine the best of both possibilities. They're better equipped than most to make that happen, but it won't be an easy road.

For more on this popular social network and how to use it to find dates you can read our Facebook review.

Just as Tinder’s founder Sean Rad was at the top of his game, enjoying the enormous success of his dating app Tinder after two short years on the market - and about to announce the new features offered in the latest version of the app - the board has decided to take away his CEO title.

As reported originally in a cover story for Forbes Magazine, Rad has been demoted to President, his management power greatly reduced for a yet-to-be-determined CEO who will take the reins of Tinder from him. According to Forbes, IAC decided that the company needed a more seasoned CEO (“an Eric Schmidt-like person”) leading it and taking it to the next level of a viable, revenue-generating business, as opposed to the young and green entrepreneur who brought Tinder to its current success. And also, preferably not a CEO tainted with scandal.

When Rad first launched Tinder, he did so with a lot of help from his friend and social trendsetter Justin Mateen. By approaching social influencers at universities (such as fraternity leaders), Mateen managed to get a lot of people using the app quickly, so the user base only grew stronger with time and more than a little PR.

Mateen and Rad built up the company together, but the scandal started when Mateen started dating one of their employees. When that relationship went south, the employee decided to pursue a sexual harassment lawsuit based on angry and inappropriate texts she had received from Mateen, and sued the company. She reportedly walked away with a little over a million dollars, but Mateen and Rad seem to be paying a higher price. Rad was implicated because he was the one who stripped her of her VP title and later “wrongfully terminated” her, according to the lawsuit.

But will all this drama derail Tinder itself? Not likely. The company continues to grow, and the revenue plan for its new premium service – Tinder Plus – rolls out this month with two new features for paying customers. The basic Tinder app will remain free.

The new version includes a travel feature called Passport, which lets users journey around the globe, swiping through matches in various cities instead of having to choose one based on their GPS location. The second feature is something users have been requesting from the beginning – an “undo” button that lets them revisit profiles they’d already rejected. Everyone deserves a second chance, right?

The company plans to launch another feature in the near future called “Places,” which will allow users who frequent the same places to meet over the app.

Will Tinder maintain the enthusiasm of its investors and the public at large after Rad steps down? Will customers be willing to pay for the benefits of Tinder Plus? We’ll have to wait and see.

Let’s face it, we human beings are visual creatures. When you meet someone new in person, what’s the first thing you do? Most likely, you look at him and decide on how attractive he is. Would you pursue him if you had an opportunity?

This type of superficial behavior is pretty standard. Most of us assess and judge others according to their appearance. The soaring popularity of apps like Tinder give us evidence that even in the digital age when we can get more information on almost anybody we meet if we just took the time to Google them – we prefer to say yes or no based on their looks.

Case in point: in the two years Tinder has been on the market, smartphone sales have gone up dramatically, which means more people have access to the app. The statistics speak for themselves. Tinder processes more than a billion swipes daily, matches more than 12 million people in the same amount of time (only a fraction of the overall swipes are mutual however), and though the company won’t release information on the number of users, sources say it could be as large as 50 million active users.

More important than people signing up for Tinder is the fact that they use it – as regularly (if not more often) as other popular social media like Facebook or Pinterest. According to a recent article in The New York Times, on average, people log in to the app 11 times a day. Women spend as much as 8 and a half minutes on it, while men spend 7.2 minutes (sorry guys). If you add it up, that’s almost 90 minutes per day.

But is the phenomenon of Tinder purely based on our basic animal instincts? Are we really only looking for someone who is physically attractive, or who embodies a physical ideal of some sort?

Maybe not. Many of Tinder’s users (mostly men) are looking to rogue apps like Tinderoid that manipulate Tinder’s database so they can “swipe right” to multiple profiles at once without even looking at a single photo. They are looking to increase their odds of matching with a woman, rather than looking for someone they find physically appealing. But what is the goal - is it just to hook up with more women? Maybe, but that’s another matter.

Tinder is a vehicle for meeting more people, and works a lot faster than your traditional online dating process. Maybe it’s appeal is not just about the photos, but instead due to the vast quantity of people you can “pick and choose” anytime, anywhere - and how quickly you can match and meet up.

The real question is: does it improve the overall dating experience? The jury is still out on that one.

The operator of a dating site for people with sexually transmitted diseases is facing a $16.5m pay out after losing a privacy case.

The site in question in PositiveSingles, a dating service for singles around the world with herpes, HPV, HIV / AIDS, hepatitis, chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis and other STDs. Back in 2011, an unnamed claimant sued the parent company, SuccessfulMatch, as part of a class action case.

SuccessfulMatch offers an affiliate scheme for new dating services as well as running a number of niche dating sites of its own. It offers both software and databases that contain the details of "hundreds of thousands of profiles" registered to its existing services – and therein lies the problem.

In the 2011 lawsuit, the owner of PositiveSingles was accused of sharing pictures and profile information from the site with other dating services, despite promising privacy and confidentiality. It was revealed that PositiveSingles is one of more than a thousand different websites that all funnel members' personal information into a single database that does, in fact, share that information with third parties.

The plaintiff acknowledged that upon completion of the registration page, members' are given a link to the Terms of Service which state that profile details – including details about HIV and other STD statuses - may be shared with other sites in the SuccessfulMatch network. By posting a profile, he said, users agree to those terms.

But he also acknowledged that few users ever read the Terms of Service, because...well...who does?

A jury found PositiveSingles guilty of breaking local consumer laws, fraud, malice and oppression. The company is now faced with paying approximately $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $15 million in punitive damages. In a hearing on October 29, 2014, the court indicated that it will issue an injunction prohibiting the illegal conduct and declared that three provisions of the Terms of Service are unconscionable.

This story follows a previous lawsuit filed by two women who attempted to sue SuccessfulMatch on similar grounds earlier in the year. A judge dismissed their claims in April after, saying they had failed to specifically allege they had actually read the Terms of Service they claimed were misleading. Despite the judge's dismissal, the women filed an amended claim and the case is still active.

Popular online dating company Zoosk announced this week the launch of Dating Insights, a new feature on its site that allows members to see a holistic view of their dating activity and preferences culled from Zoosk’s original “behavior-based” matching technology.

Zoosk has long marketed the benefits of its technology, which tracks how users behave on its site and matches them accordingly. For instance, if Zoosk notices that you mostly reach out to bookish guys, then it will start matching you with more literary types. It works for both daters and Zoosk, because the more you use the service, the better (and more curated) your matches will be.

The new feature Dating Insights will offer members information about their own individual dating preferences, and will also aggregate information about members who have shown some interest. The idea is to help you understand your patterns and preferences so you can have a better overall dating experience.

Dating Insights is divided into three sections:

Who Likes You – this feature provides demographics of matches who have shown the most interest in the user, like those of a particular age, body type, education, ethnicity, religion, and whether or not they smoke.

Who You Like – Zoosk sums up your preferences, not based on your profile, but on your behavior. For instance, Zoosk will let you know that “you put more importance on a man’s level of education than most” or “The Lord of the Rings is the book liked most by the men you’re interested in.”

Your Dating Style – this shows how often (and how well) you are using the dating site, and provides tips on how to improve your experience.

It only makes sense that the online dating company would harness its own technology to offer daters insight into how they are dating, since they use it to match daters anyway. But they aren't the first.

OkCupid has used information gathered from its own users as well to shed light on how people date online. Co-founder Christian Rudder analyzed the extensive data the company collected to understand online dating trends and to provide its members with more services they want (for a fee) – such as the ability to rate dates and filtering out people who don’t physically match your ideal. eHarmony also provides insight to daters as part of its package of services, though it is more personalized. eHarmony offers a “profile book” once you have finished with its extensive questionnaire, where you can find out what your strengths and weaknesses are as a dater and in a relationship.

Helping daters understand the online dating experience and what they want isn’t new, but hopefully the more opportunities daters have to see this kind of information, the better their experiences will be.

For more about this service you can read our Zoosk review.

The FTC has filed its first lawsuit against an online dating company, accusing UK-based JDI Dating of luring customers to pay money through fake profiles the company created.

A settlement between the FTC and JDI Dating prohibits the company from using fake profiles and requires it to refund more than $616,000 to customers. JDI operates 18 websites including cupidswand.com, flirtcrowd.com and findmelove.com.

According to a press release distributed by the FTC on the matter, JDI was tricking customers by offering them a free plan and allowing them to set up profiles and upload photos. Once customers completed this process, they began to receive messages supposedly from other users, but were unable to respond until they bought a paid membership. Membership for the sites ranged anywhere from $10 to $30 per month.

Unfortunately, the profiles that usually attracted paying customers were often virtually generated, so once new members were paying for their subscriptions, they weren't able to communicate with the matches they thought they were getting - because they never existed.

“JDI Dating used fake profiles to make people think they were hearing from real love interests and to trick them into upgrading to paid memberships,” said Jessica Rich, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

The prevalence of fake profiles has long been an issue for online daters, but this new lawsuit is finally shedding some legal light on the problem. Because of this, more online dating companies will probably be re-thinking their freemium services (attracting users with free services and later asking them to pay for certain "privileges" on the site.) Freemium services are often based on how many members join the site - numbers are key in the online dating world, because high numbers attract more people. The more valuable a company's user database, the more likely people would be willing to pay for their matches, because they feel that they are getting more choices.

In addition to generating fake profiles, the FTC found that JDI was also misleading consumers about payments. The company did not inform customers that subscriptions would have recurring charges until the customer canceled the service (which was tricky to find on the site), so many people paid for the site after they stopped using it without realizing it.

Rich added, “Users were charged automatically to renew their subscriptions – often without their consent.”

Again, this is a common practice among online dating sites. Several do have recurring charges, and it's often difficult to figure out how and where on a site to fully cancel services and erase your profile. For example, free dating sites like Plenty of Fish have kept profiles of members who are no longer using the service without clearly explaining to customers how to fully delete them. Although they are not charging for their services, it could be misleading to other daters.

The FTC lawsuit is a positive step in helping companies in the online dating industry clean up their databases and be more honest with the services they provide. We'll see if other companies are named in the future.