Mobile

Female Tinder users have dealt with a lot of inappropriate messages from men when dating through the app – it’s one of the issues challenging dating apps today. Men are particularly aggressive in their flirting, crossing boundaries with their sexual suggestions and then wondering why they don’t hear back.

A California-based computer engineer, who incidentally met his girlfriend on Tinder, had heard a lot of his female friends complaining about the guys messaging them over the dating app. In an interview with website The Verge, he disclosed that he had been able to hack Tinder, matching straight guys with other straight guys to see how their typically aggressive flirting progresses.

"The original idea was to throw that back into the face of the people doing it to see how they would react," the hacker said.

His program identifies two men who swipe right on one of his bait profiles (one using a prominent vlogger’s image, the second one of a friend who had let him use her photos). Then they are matched to each other (since they already have the woman they were originally attracted to in common). The suitors’ messages, according to The Verge, were all “unabashedly flirtatious” and relayed back and forth to each other through the dummy profile. Sometimes, it took several messages before the duped men started to figure out something was off.

The creator of the hack apparently stepped in before things got to heated and the matches decided to meet in person. Most of them seemed very confused after exchanging a few flirtatious emails, only to discover later that they weren’t flirting with women, but other men. The hacker witnessed about 40 conversations in the first twelve hours.

It has been reported that Tinder is vulnerable to hacks. There have been a few instances of people tweaking the app to “mass-like” several women at the same time, improving their odds of getting a match exponentially.

The Tinder hacker looked into Tinder’s API and discovered it had few safeguards. “Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he said. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person.”  

When asked how he feels about hacking into Tinder’s system, he has mixed feelings. "They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he says of the users. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Before flirting with someone you just met over Tinder, you might want to ask a few basic questions first.

You may know Coffee Meets Bagel as the company that turned down the largest offer in Shark Tank history.

For those of you keeping score, that would be a mind-blowing $30 million from Mark Cuban.

Entrepreneurs and sisters Arum, Dawoon, and Soo Kang came to the tank seeking $500,000 for 5 percent of Coffee Meets Bagel, a dating service that uses Facebook profile info to make matches between friends of friends. Without flinching, they rejected Cuban's $30 million offer on the grounds that they saw CMB growing as big as Match, a billion-dollar business.

Anyone else wiping sweat off their foreheads just thinking about that?

CMB went on to close a $7.8 million series A financing round earlier this year, and has now started its international expansion with Hong Kong. The sisters chose Hong Kong for their international launch due to “the highly social nature of life in this city,” they told Forbes, “coupled with the fact that people are often time poor thanks to long work hours.”

Dawoon Kang lived in HK for three years while working at J.P. Morgan, so she's well-versed in the city's dating scene. “Hong Kong is a very young, vibrant city full of ambitious singles in their 20s and 30s who are eager to meet new people but have very little time for it,” she explains. Coffee Meets Bagel was designed for exactly that market of busy young professionals, making Hong Kong an ideal choice for expansion.

Dawoon says the service has achieved consistent 20 percent week on week growth since launch, primarily driven by Facebook. Hong Kong members have a substantial number of Facebook friends – nearly 8 times the worldwide standards – resulting in each Hong Kong Coffee Meets Bagel member having around 48 Facebook friends who also use the app. CMB is primed for success in its new home.

The Kang sisters have noticed differences in the way Hong Kong members and US members use the app. Dawoon says: “On average, 72 percent of Hong Kong members log in every day to check their Bagel. Of these, 77 percent are connecting on an iPhone. They log in 4.3 times a day (33 percent higher than US members) and spend a total of 7.7 minutes a day (117 percent higher than US members).”

On the other hand, the gender ratio is similar in HK, NYC, and Washington DC (62 percent of members in Hong Kong are female). Academic achievements are also similar, with 98 percent of membership in both HK and the US boasting bachelors degrees.

From here, the Kangs plan to continue their international expansion, perhaps one day to their birth country of South Korea.

Dating app Coffee Meets Bagel has taken a back seat to the spectacular rise of Tinder the past few years. This however has not daunted the company’s founders, three sisters who left their cushy corporate jobs to fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams. (Not to mention, they wanted to create a dating app that they would like to use!)

Now, the company has taken its carefully executed roll-out in the U.S. and is expanding internationally. Hong Kong was the first place outside of the U.S. where the service was launched.

CMB takes its operations seriously. Instead of giving in to the “more is more” trend in dating - offering unlimited looks at profiles and encouraging users to choose “yes” or “no” in a matter of seconds – this dating app offers users one match per day. And you have 24 hours to mull it over, choosing to like or pass. If you like, you have a week to make a real date happen through the app’s private chat line, or it’s on to the next. In other words, it forces users to carefully consider and follow through, instead of swiping at will and sending a few messages that never lead to a date.

Facebook is a key platform in spreading interest in the app overseas, since Hong Kong users (according to a recent article in Forbes) have an average of 768 Facebook friends each, eight times the worldwide standard. Also, Hong Kong is a highly social city, although people spend more time at work than they do trying to meet people to date. It made for the perfect place to launch the dating app’s international roll-out.

Co-Founder Dawoon Kang lived in Hong Kong for three years, experiencing the dating scene for herself. (She and her current boyfriend met over CMB). “Hong Kong is a very young, vibrant city full of ambitious singles in their 20s and 30s who are eager to meet new people but have very little time for it. Coffee Meets Bagel was designed with these young professionals in mind, which made Hong Kong our perfect market – and our initial results show that,” she told Forbes.

On average, Hong Kong users are logging in 4.3 times per day (33% more than U.S. members), and 72% log in each day to check their matches. Like in the U.S., more CMB members are female – 62% of the Hong Kong user base are women, although there are more single men overall in China.

The service launched in Hong Kong on March 4^th, and before the month was over, the company had made 3,000 connections. According to Kang, CMB has also achieved consistent 20 percent week on week growth.

Have you ever swiped right on a Tinder match only to discover her profile isn’t real? Since the famous dating app partnered with mobile identity company TeleSign, it claims spam is down as much as 90%.

Spam has been a growing problem for Tinder– prostitutes masquerading as potential love matches eager to sell their services, hackers using the dating app to obtain valuable user information, and even companies like The Gap aiming to capitalize on the 18-25 market with clever marketing campaigns. (Last month they set up their campaign ads as Tinder user profiles without explicit permission from the company – and were asked to take them down.) Also, there was the incident of a hacker tinkering with their API to match straight men with other straight men, which ended up confusing and embarrassing a lot of users.

Even though Tinder verifies people through their Facebook accounts, many people have become adept at creating fake social media accounts, too. So Tinder’s new deal with Telesign seems to be alleviating the problem.

Telesign works by analyzing massive amounts of real-time and historical data on phone numbers, including associated contact information, phone types, geographies, and carriers. Their technology uses PhoneID verification to determine how potentially risky a phone number is, and whether the number really belongs to the person creating the account. If the score is high (meaning high risk), the user is blocked. Telesign also recommended that Tinder implement rate limits. This means that Tinder can set a limit for the number of accounts created using the same phone number. The companies did not say whether the analyzed information from Tinder users is kept private, or how it could be used by TeleSign or Tinder.

Ryan Ogle, Tinder’s CTO said in a statement: “Once we had TeleSign in place, we were able to block fraudulent accounts in a much more sophisticated way. It’s been 100 percent accurate and we’ve seen about a 90 percent reduction in spam traffic as a result, from day one.”

Tinder has taken other steps to cut back on spammers, including limiting the amount of swipes people can do in a 24-hour period with the free service. If they want to swipe indefinitely (as spam bots often do), they will have to pay for Tinder Plus.

This is another big step for the company, which seems to be making significant changes in recent months. IAC, the parent company of Tinder, has brought in a new CEO, and in March, Tinder rolled out its first paid service, Tinder Plus.

Check out our review of Tinder for more information on this popular dating app.

Real talk about Tinder: it can be a frustrating, maybe even scary, place to be a woman sometimes.

In fact, any online dating site fits that description. The entire Internet fits that description. Give people an anonymous username to hind behind, and suddenly all their worst behavior is on full display. I'm not saying it's everyone, but it's enough people to make it a serious problem.

Normally serious problems require serious solutions, but a California-based programmer decided to take a more humorous approach.

According to The Verge, the unnamed programmer tweaked Tinder's API, turning it into “a catfish machine that fools men into thinking they’re talking to women – when in fact they’re talking with each other.” He began by creating bait profiles, one using the image of a popular vlogger and the other using the image of a friend who gave her consent.

He then developed a program to identify men who indicate interest in one of the bait profiles. Once it finds two, the program matches them to each other and lets them begin the awkward, hilarious process of striking up a conversation. Within minutes of activation, the program was hard at work.

The programmer – who The Verge calls “Patrick” – estimates he witnessed 40 conversations within the first 12 hours. He developed a code to scramble phone numbers and stepped in if a real world meeting was in the cards, but says he feels torn about the ethics of his prank.

"They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he told The Verge. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Patrick's prank was inspired by his female friends who often complained about their interactions on Tinder. His first plan was to build a Twitter bot that tweeted every first message received by a female friend, but after looking into Tinder's API, he discovered it had few protections and his vision grew.

"Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he says. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person."

Patrick is far from the first to reveal the weakness of Tinder's API, but he's certainly the funniest and most socially relevant. Other hacks can be and have been used for morally ambiguous, or even dangerous, purposes. This one is good for a few laughs and makes a valid, important point about the way we treat each other online.

To read some of the priceless exchanges, check out the original post on The Verge. Check out our review of Tinder for more about the dating app.

For most people, Tinder is, at best, a chance to find a date and, at worst, an amusing diversion when standing in line or when there's nothing good on Netflix. But for artist and hacker Matthew Rothenberg, Tinder is an opportunity for an art project.

The project is called Swipe Left, and in it he inserts imagery of drone strikes and drone strike victims into the dating app. “For most of my career I've explored how real people and communities interact with technology,” Rothenberg writes on his website, “and all the messy things that happen when they do.”

That's exactly what this project does, although “messy” is a strong understatement. Rothenberg drew a complex connection between Tinder use and drone strikes. “The interface of Tinder is consciously reductionist,” he writes on Medium. “You get a name, age, and (sometimes) a very brief bio. The decision tree is binary: yes or no (or in Tinder UI, swipe right or left). No winks, nudges, or ratings. No bookmarking to come back later for decision. You have to make a decision in order to move on.”

Every decision made on Tinder is final. Accidentally swipe left on the love of your life, and they're gone for good. But, Tinder reminds you, there's a new potential love waiting just on the other side of that swipe. They're available immediately. There's no time for regret, remorse, reflection – the cycle continues instantly, and users are left feeling fine about the fact that they just reduced an incredibly complex thing – love – to a painfully simple activity.

And then there's drone strikes. Part of the reason they are so controversial is “the sense of dehumanized technology,” Rothenberg says. The kill list looks remarkably similar to something else: a list of members who meet a series of criteria, a photo, their age, a brief bio. In the end it's a simple binary decision. Yes or no. Swipe right or swipe left.

In both cases, the computer mediated user interface provides a distancing barrier between the viewer and an action. The barrier creates a sense of separation and encourages quick action. So what happens when New Yorkers find “drone strikes images interspersed with their continuous yes-and-no swiping to Tinder matches of shirtless-ab-photos and Instagram-filtered-art-selfies taken in the MoMA rain room?”

Well, the “what” isn't actually important, according to Rothenberg. He is uninterested in which way people swipe, merely the fact that they have to swipe. “How viewers choose to react is far less interesting to me than the fact that they’ve been forced into this situation to begin with,” he says. Any reaction at all is a valid and interesting data point for the Swipe Left project.