Tinder

Dating services have collaborated with fashion labels, food brands, artists, candlemakers, musicians, movies, television networks, sports teams and charities - but a new crop of partnership deals may be the most surprising yet. According to a recent report by the Houston Chronicle, Tinder and Bumble are hosting parties with fraternities on college campuses. In return, the fraternities are signing contracts declaring that they are exclusively a Tinder house or a Bumble house.

“Simply scan to enroll!,” read a sign posted outside a University of Texas party earlier this year, referring to a scannable QR code printed below. “Must: be within five miles of campus, be ages 18-22, have an existing Tinder profile, have UT Austin in your profile.”

Rosette Pambakian

Rosette Pambakian, former Tinder VP of marketing and communications, is suing the company and its ex-CEO. Pambakian filed a lawsuit on Monday, August 5, accusing the former CEO of Match Group and Tinder, Gregory Blatt, of harassing and sexually assaulting her at a company holiday party in 2016. The suit also alleges that the company fired Pambakian in retaliation for going public with her accusations.

Pambakian says the assault took place at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills. According to the lawsuit, Blatt approached Pambakian at the party and made sexual comments to her “in a lewd voice.” Pambakian says she went to a hotel room upstairs with two colleagues to get away from Blatt, but later that night, he found his way to their room. When he entered, he groped and kissed Pambakian while the two colleagues, one of whom was Blatt’s executive assistant, witnessed the nonconsensual encounter. Together they distracted Blatt until he finally left in a car service, the complaint says.

Swipe right for romance and… revolution? As the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong continue into their third month, and the police response has become violent, demonstrators are growing increasingly creative in their tactics. Tech-savvy activists are now turning to their favorite mobile apps - including Telegram, WhatsApp, Pokemon Go and Tinder - to organize demonstrations and share tips for evading authorities.

Gavin Huang, an editor for the Chinese culture website Goldthread, took to Twitter to share a photo of a Tinder profile he encountered. “So it’s come to this,” he wrote on August 1, “I’m getting protest info on Tinder.” The attached screenshot shows a profile picture with a schedule of protest events and a bio inviting curious swipers to join a strike.

Study on Access to Personal Info by Dating Apps

Image: datingroo

Dating app users often don’t realize how much personal information they are giving away just by signing up. But Datingroo, a U.K.-based online dating research company, has released a new study that shows exactly how little privacy most dating app users have.

Datingroo studied the ten most popular dating apps from Tinder to PlentyofFish to eHarmony, examining 45 personal data access points in 13 categories such as precise location, other accounts on the device, network connections, and modification or deletion of the contents on USB storage, and found some surprising results.

Among all the apps, Badoo and PlentyofFish have access to the most data in user’s devices (92% of all access points studied). Combined, they have more than 522 million users worldwide, which means they have access to an enormous amount of information. Coffee Meets Bagel has the fewest users (7 million), as well as the least data access.

Match Group stock rose considerably after its second quarter earnings report was better than expected, thanks in large part to its star dating app Tinder.

According to Reuters, Match Group revenue for the three months ended June 30 was revealed in a recent earnings call with investors. It rose about 18% to $498 million, about $10 million higher than forecast. The company grew its average subscriber base 40.5% to 5.2 million in the same quarter, more than expected, thanks to its new features and the launch of Tinder Lite. Match now expects to add over 1.6 million average subscribers in 2019, much higher than the 1 million the company had forecast earlier. With all this good news, Match Group stock rose 17 percent.

Tinder Lite provides a version of the app that uses less storage and provides faster service, thanks to a scaled-down version of the famous swiping technology. It launched for Android phones in certain countries in both Southeast Asia and South America, where most people use less expensive Android phones and Internet speed is slower.

App companies are growing frustrated with splitting their increasing revenues with Google Play and the Apple Store, as they continue to pay 30 percent to the tech giants on every transaction made through their app stores. But now, Tinder is offering its customers a direct payment method, a way to bypass Google Play altogether.

The popular dating app is allowing its Android users to enter their credit card information directly into the app rather than using Google Play to buy premium subscriptions like Tinder Gold and Tinder Plus. Once you’ve entered the information, the app automatically defaults to this payment system for all future in-app purchases and renewal fees as well.

According to The Verge, Tinder isn’t the first company to side-step app stores. Epic Games, a popular video game developer, last year released its hit game Fortnite via its own downloadable launcher to avoid giving Google 30 percent of its revenues. Popular music service Spotify has filed an anti-trust complaint against Apple with the European Union for alleged anti-competitive tactics. Apple is now being investigated by the Union for disadvantaging other companies in favor of its own offerings, specifically Apple Music, which competes directly with Spotify. Netflix is also looking at options to avoid the Apple and Google Play stores, especially with Apple now entering the content business.