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Young daters in India are looking to find love based on their passion for sports like Cricket, according to a new study by dating app Happn.

According to the Deccan Chronicle, more than 60 percent of singles on the app are looking to match with someone who shares their love of sports. Cricket is by far the favorite sport among daters, but women over 35 are particularly enthralled with the sport (79 percent) and are more likely to match with someone else who shares that passion.

The majority of singles (over 70 percent) also want their partners to be athletic as well as being into sports. Among Gen Z singles, that figure rises to 83 percent. Women are more interested in playing a sport together on a date than men are, too.

Image: Grindr

Grindr has announced it has partnered with Equality in Movement in Georgia and MPOWER in Ireland to connect its users in these countries with at-home HIV testing kits.

According to the company’s blog post, Grindr says it wants to address the global HIV epidemic by making it easier for its users to have access to testing. While many countries have local testing centers, they can still be difficult to access, expensive, and many people still don’t want the stigma of going to a public place to get tested.

Users in Georgia and Ireland will have dedicated buttons on the app’s interface to order at-home self-test kits, any time of day. The app wanted the access to tests to be as simple as Covid tests have become for most folks. The company also wants to encourage more people to test for HIV by alleviating the stigma with in-person tests and allowing them to test in the privacy of their own home.

A new survey from Forbes Health has revealed that a whopping 80 percent of Gen Z and Millennial respondents said they are burned out from dating apps.

Forbes surveyed 1,000 singles over eighteen years old who had used a dating app in the past year and found that 40 percent of people feel burned out because they have been unable to find a good connection with someone on an app. Meanwhile, 35 percent say it’s due to being disappointed by people, and 27 percent say it’s because they have been rejected.

Interestingly, twenty-four percent say they feel burned out because of having repetitive conversations with many matches at once, 22 percent say it’s due to swiping, and 21 percent say it’s from all the time they spend on the apps, according to Forbes.

Dating app Grindr has been sued in the U.K. for allegedly selling the HIV status of its users to third parties.

According to the BBC, the claim was filed in London’s High Court, and alleges that “covert tracking technology” was used to track and illegally share the personal health status of users with advertisers. More than 650 claimants were affected along with reportedly thousands of other U.K. users.

Sharing personal and sensitive data of users with third parties without their consent is illegal in the U.K.

The lawsuit says the information shared with third parties includes the ethnicities and sexual orientations of users. It also says the sharing of such information took place primarily before April 2018, though some data was shared as recently as April 2020. The lawsuit specifically names two companies which help app developers analyze user engagement, Apptimize and Localytics, as involved third parties with access to the data. The lawsuit also claims that these outside firms might have retained some of the sensitive data for their own purposes.

Grindr’s CEO George Arrison is planning to monetize the app more aggressively, including launching an AI chatbot and putting previously free features behind a paywall.

News website Platformer broke the news about Grindr’s plans to launch an AI-based “boyfriend” chatbot feature that can engage in sexually explicit conversations with users, for a price. Some employees have expressed weariness, as the AI-generated conversations could be based in part on private chats between other human users, pending their consent.

Platformer also learned that Grindr is revising its terms of service to ask people signing up if the company can train their AI models on their personal data, which can include direct messages. This is likely to be a privacy issue going forward for other dating apps who could pursue employing user data to train AI.

BLK dating app has unveiled Spring Mode to help foster more connection among college students during their spring break vacations, when many are traveling and looking to meet people.

According to Blavity, the feature allows college students to place a fun badge on their profiles of the place they plan to visit over their spring break, in case other potential matches might be traveling there, too. Destinations include Hawaii, Cancun, Jamaica, Los Angeles, Cabo, the Dominican Republic, Cancun, Las Vegas, and Miami among other prime locations.

The badges all have unique personality and style, and are modeled after the famous places they represent. The vision behind Spring Mode according to Jonathan Kirkland, BLK’s head of marketing and brand, is in line with the company’s overall commitment to fostering connection and community as well as inclusivity.