Dating Services

A new motion was filed in the New York Supreme Court against Match Group and IAC for allegedly covering up a report of sexual misconduct to manipulate the valuation of dating app Tinder, according to a report by Bloomberg. Match Group is the parent company of Tinder, and at the time of the incident, was owned by IAC. 

Lawyers for former Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad and other Tinder employees who filed the lawsuit said that there are internal company documents that reveal IAC and Match Group executives discussed covering up sexual assault allegations against former Match Group CEO Greg Blatt, but that the companies are concealing them. They argue that IAC and Match Group intended to keep Blatt on board so he could lowball Tinder’s value, and therefore cheat Tinder employees out of billions in payment for their stock options.

Tinder was testing a group video chat feature before its parent company Match Group struck an acquisition deal for South Korea social discovery company Hyperconnect.

The new feature was called Tinder Mixer and was being tested in New Zealand before it was scrapped, according to Tech Crunch. Tinder Mixer allowed people nearby to join group chats and play online video games together, adding to the app’s existing one-on-one virtual chat feature.

Tinder Mixer was discovered by researcher Alessandro Paluzzi, who found references to the feature in the app’s code. However, Tinder shut it down quickly and told Tech Crunch it’s not impacting its “product roadmap” for this year. However, Paluzzi’s findings about Tinder Mixer shows that Match Group is experimenting with new social discovery features through its dating apps, which shines some light on the company’s deal with Hyperconnect.

Omiai Dating App Homepage

One of Japan’s leading dating apps Omiai reported that it had been hacked, exposing the personal data of over 1.7 million of its users in one of the country’s most high-profile security breaches.

According to Bloomberg, some of the data leaked was especially sensitive, including photo IDs from driver’s licenses, insurance cards and passports that are used to verify users’ ages. Credit card data was not exposed, according to the company, but it’s unclear how many accounts were accessed.

The app’s developer Net Marketing Co said that after discovering the breach, it blocked the hacker’s IP address and implemented a number of other security procedures to safeguard user data, according to Gizmodo. Still, Japanese markets responded unfavorably to the news with the company’s stock falling 19 percent. Since Net Marketing Co went public in 2017, this has been the biggest drop in share price for the $70 million company. 

Blink, the first audio-only dating app, aims to shift attention away from swiping and towards getting to know each other through conversation.

According to its website, matching over Blink is a two-part process. First, you sign up and provide only one photo for your profile, along with a few timeslots that you are available for ten-minute audio-only speed dating rounds. There’s no algorithm matching people on the app - instead it’s left to coinciding schedules and chance. During the 10-minute speed dating rounds, participants enter online “rooms” where they chat with a blind date, and then when the ten minutes are up, move to the next room and the next date.

The U.S. government is doing all it can to encourage people to get vaccinated, including partnering with dating apps to reach more people while they congregate online. Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, Hinge, Match and Plenty of Fish are some of the most high-profile apps participating.

The dating apps are providing some incentives for vaccinated users, too – including vaccination status badges for easy identification among matches, search filters according to who has gotten the vaccine, and free access to popular paid features, according to NextGov. 

For example, Tinder users can indicate whether they support vaccines on their profile and vaccinated users can access “Super Likes” – a popular paid feature that allows users to let someone know if they are really interested.

Seniors are a growing demographic of online daters, and they are flocking to popular dating apps, including Tinder, according to a recent study.

Independent insurance group Choice Mutual found that about one third of seniors who have dated in the last five years have looked to dating apps to meet people. In addition, two thirds of those using dating apps have found relationships with someone they met through the platforms, according to Forbes. 

Some top choices of apps were Tinder, Match and Hinge, with 35 percent of respondents saying Tinder was the platform where they met the person they were dating. Twenty-eight percent said they had the best luck on Match, 25 percent had found someone either on Hinge or Plenty of Fish, and 24 percent had found their significant other on Bumble.