Match Group

Dating conglomerate Match Group was ordered to pay $2 million USD to settle a civil lawsuit filed by Santa Cruz County involving the company’s practices when it comes to automatic renewals. Match Group app users complained of a confusing and difficult process when they wanted to terminate their accounts and were often unaware when the company automatically renewed their membership without notifying or asking them to do so.

According to The San Diego Union Tribune, the settlement was signed by a Santa Cruz Superior Court Judge in early July, and the company was ordered to pay civil penalties and victim restitution that amounted to $2 million. Match Group has also been ordered to change its renewal and termination processes to make them more transparent to customers, including getting consent from users via a checkbox before automatically renewing their subscriptions, and emailing customers confirmations of transactions.

“Consumers should be protected from practices that deceptively and unfairly force them to pay for something they don’t want,” L.A. District Attorney Gascón told Canyon News. “We want companies to thrive, but they should be mindful to not abuse technology tools to violate consumer protections.”

Tinder has noticed a popular trend emerging in the past week – users from around the world are changing their location to match with athletes staying in Olympic Village.

Tinder’s popular Passport feature was made available to all users at no cost for limited times during pandemic lockdowns, and many members took advantage. Passport allows users to switch locations to match with anyone in the world, regardless of where they currently live. And recently, Tinder users began changing their location to match with athletes participating in the Olympics.

There’s no current tally of the number of Tinder users setting their romantic sights on 2021 Olympic athletes, but referencing 2018 numbers, Tinder confirmed to Newsweek that there was an increase of 1,850 percent of users accessing Passport to match with athletes in the Olympic Village. 

POF Error Message

We started getting reports that the dating service Plenty of Fish (aka POF) was experiencing some downtime on Thursday July 28th at 6pm EST for about an hour and then the issue seemed to fix itself.

That little blip was a precursor of things to come as by 2am on July 29th both the POF website and apps went down again and stayed down until about 2pm the same day. Most users seem to experience about 12 hours of downtime with others still reporting issues as late as 11pm that Friday night. During Friday afternoon some users experienced POF to be up and working for a bit and then all of a sudden going down again.

Dating app Hinge is doubling down on its “designed to be deleted” tagline to offer a series of new ads featuring users deleting their profiles after finding love.

According to Ad Age, there will be four spots, each featuring a humorous take on a Hinge user trying to “break up” with their old Hinge profiles because they have met someone special and no longer want to date. The global campaign was created with creative agency partner Opinionated.

One ad shows a young man at a restaurant surrounded by his alter ego profile pictures, including one of him with a surfboard, holding a dog, and one where an ex-girlfriend had been marked over with a sharpie. He’s breaking the news to them that despite the fact that they created “the perfect profile” he would have to delete them. The alter egos think he’s joking, asking if he is joining a monastery, but he reveals he met someone special and they have to go – at which point they disappear.

Dating app Tinder has partnered with VisitHealth to offer free mental health services to its users in India.

Through July, all existing and new Tinder members in India will have free access to emotional wellness content through the dating app, such as guided meditations and fitness videos among other health initiatives, according to The Times of India.

In addition, every Tinder member will have access to two free sessions with a licensed therapist across all major Indian languages. Participating members can also have access to continued support at discounted rates after those first two sessions.

The pandemic has been difficult mentally and emotionally for people around the world, and young people looking for connection have been especially vulnerable. More than half of India’s Tinder members are 18 to 25-year-olds, and as The Times of India points out, they have become more open in sharing their lives with others over the app in order to feel more connected - including who they are, how they look, and how they feel. Since the start of the pandemic, Tinder noted that mentions of the word “anxious” grew by 20 percent, and the word “normalize” was used 11 times more frequently in bios from March 2020 until now.

Tinder is rolling out a number of new features, including the ability to add video to profiles and a new virtual speed dating feature for users called Hot Takes.

Previously Tinder only allowed users to post a limited number of photos to their profiles, but now they are allowing members to swap these photos for video content instead, according to a report by CNBC. The aim is to help members get a better idea of someone’s personality before swiping right.

In addition, the dating company will be adding a new feature called “Hot Takes,” which lets users chat with someone briefly before they actually match, in a kind of speed dating experience with video. This mode occurs nightly from 6pm to midnight in your time zone, according to The Verge. Daters will be given questions to answer like “Which of these is the most pretentious?” along with some choices. Members can chat until there’s no response for 30 seconds, in which case the chat disappears. Participants will be able to match with each other from this feature, too.