Types (Niche)

The government in the municipality of Tokyo announced it will be launching a state-run dating app to help young singles connect, and to increase birth and marriage rates. This state run dating app was first brought to our intention back at the beginning of the year.

According to Associated Press, “Tokyo Futari Story,” the city’s new initiative, is an effort to increase couples or “futari,” in a country where young people are more commonly alone. The initiative will involve an online dating site, but the government is also developing an app.

Tokyo City Hall is heading the project and has declined to disclose many details. However, The Japan Times reported that singles who sign up will need to verify their identity through official documentation, and to prove that they are single. Government officials told the paper that tax records will be required to prove income, and potential users of the app must sign a form that says they are ready to marry. (The intention of the app is, after all, to increase marriages and childbirth rates.)

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.

Grindr’s new Chief Privacy Officer Kelly Peterson Miranda is setting the record straight regarding the app’s privacy policies and use of personal data following allegations and a recent lawsuit.

The interview with The Record Media takes place in the wake of several allegations that Grindr has violated user privacy rights when it comes to their personal data.

The LGBTQ dating app was sued in April for allegedly sharing the HIV status of its users with third parties without their consent. Before that, its former privacy officer Ronald De Jesus has said that the company stored user data, including photos and videos, even after people deleted their accounts, which violated the app’s privacy policy.

And last year, the Electronic Privacy Information Center appealed to the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Grindr for its history of abuses.

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 says it will be offering the biggest change to its platform in the app’s history, describing the app’s new purpose to be a “gayborhood in your pocket.”

According to Axios, the gay dating app was under pressure from both users and investors to give a facelift to the app, which has remained essentially the same for the past few years. Arison has been teasing these changes lately, including the new feature Roam which will allow users to set a location on the app to where they are traveling, so they can match and message with people before arriving.

The new features are currently being tested and Arison plans to launch them later this year.