Legal

That dating services sometimes make dubious claims should surprise no one, but rarely do their fishy fabrications make headlines. Unfortunately for eHarmony, a recent misstep has proved to be the exception.

The company's claim that it uses a "scientifically-proven matching system" has been banned by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority after appearing on a billboard in the London Underground.

"Step aside, fate,” the advertisement boldly proclaimed. “It's time science had a go at love."

In the smaller print below, it continued: "Imagine being able to stack the odds of finding lasting love entirely in your favour. EHarmony's scientifically-proven matching system decodes the mystery of compatibility and chemistry so you don't have to. Why leave the most important search of your life to chance?"

Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO of female-friendly dating app Bumble, was just named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” list, and is featured on its December 2017 cover. This is no small feat – her dating app has amassed a large following with 70% year-on-year growth, according to the article, and has 22 million registered users. In comparison Tinder has 46 million registered users and last year saw growth at 10%.

The company is also being eyed by Match Group, owner of dating app rival Tinder, and is said to be in talks for over a billion dollars as an asking price. Herd turned down the company’s original offer of $450 million, according to recent reports.

Animal rights activists are up and arms over the latest Tinder profile craze – posting selfies with large animals, specifically tigers, in an effort to impress potential dates.

PETA sent a formal request to Tinder asking the company to take a more active approach to condemning these photos and to ban tiger selfies altogether, citing that they are exploitative. Tinder responded in kind by posting a blog on its website, asking users to remove these selfies out of respect for other daters.

PETA noted in its letter that the practice is cruel because the tigers have to be caged, tied down or drugged in order to take the photo. Animals used as so-called “photo props” were typically taken from their mothers as babies and subject to abuse. When they grow older, they become too dangerous to handle and end up being locked in cages.

Online dating corporation Match Group was reported to have made an offer to purchase dating app Bumble for $450 million this summer, according to a report by website Tech Crunch.

Match Group is the parent company to a number of dating apps, including popular Bumble competitors Match, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid and Tinder. It seems Bumble hasn’t accepted the offer, which is understandable since some analysts value the company at almost a billion dollars.

Bumble has a rocky history with Match Group as well, which could play a part in any decision about an acquisition. Bumble’s founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe sued Tinder and IAC in 2014, (when Match Group was a part of IAC). Wolfe was one of the co-founders of Tinder, and brought a sexual harassment lawsuit against her ex-boyfriend Justin Mateen, who also happened to be one of Tinder’s co-founders and the CMO. Wolfe accused him of sending her “sexist, racist, and otherwise inappropriate comments, emails, and text messages” following their very public breakup. The two parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, with neither side admitting any wrongdoing.

A dating app with a hook-up reputation is getting it on IRL, too. In July, the popular dating app hired event organizers to throw parties for its most exclusive members in a rented house in the Hamptons. Unfortunately, partygoers (and Tinder) were soon booted out.

According to an article in Gizmodo, the company threw “a series of parties at telecom mogul Michael Hirtenstein’s oceanfront home...Over the weekends of July 14th and July 21th, cops reportedly visited the property multiple times due to noise complaints from neighbors.”

According to Page Six, attendees were also cited for carrying open containers and illegally parking.

Online dating skeptics have plenty of reasons for opting out of modern singles’ favorite way to date, but here’s one they probably hadn’t thought of yet: personal photos being stolen for use in AI experiments.

A user of Kaggle, a platform for machine learning and data science competitions which was recently acquired by Google, exploited Tinder’s API to scrape 40,000 profile photos from Bay Area users of the dating app. He used them to train artificial intelligence, and also organized the images into a downloadable facial data set called People of Tinder.

Stuart Colianni, the creator of the data set, described it as a “simple script to scrape Tinder profile photos for the purpose of creating a facial dataset.” He also described Tinder as offering “near unlimited access to create a facial data set” and said his scraping the app offers “an extremely efficient way to collect such data.”