General News

Tinder is rolling out a new feature to allow users to block people in their lives from appearing on their match list – whether it’s an ex, a family member, or a work colleague you don’t want mixing with your dating life.

According to Tech Crunch, the new feature allows users to upload their phone contacts and select which people from their list they don’t want to see on the app. The company says it won’t store the user’s contacts, only the ones they have chosen to block. It should be noted that blocked contacts won’t be notified that they’ve been blocked, so the feature is also intended to be discreet.

People will be allowed to unblock or disconnect their contacts list at any time, according to The Verge.

Hinge Vaccine Badge

Image: Hinge

Dating apps are offering vaccine stickers for user profiles in the U.K., so potential matches can know vaccination status right away before swiping right.

Tinder is offering an array of stickers, including “Vaccinated” and “Vaxing soon,” according to a report from BBC News. Tinder, Match, Hinge, Bumble, Badoo, Plenty of Fish, OurTime and Muzmatch will all be offering badge options for users to add to their profiles, in partnership with a vaccine push by the U.K. government.

The vaccination badge trend began for U.S. dating app users, thanks to a government initiative to get as many people vaccinated as possible. The Biden administration pursued a partnership with dating apps, hoping they would be a good way to reach out to younger people and give them an incentive to get the vaccine – i.e., they can brag that they did and potentially attract more matches.

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.