Would background checks make dating apps safer?
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Match Group, the largest dating app conglomerate in the US, doesn’t perform background checks on any of its apps’ free users. A ProPublica report today highlights a few incidents in which registered sex offenders went on dates with women who had no idea they were talking to a convicted criminal. These men then raped the women on their dates, leaving the women to report them to the police and to the apps’ moderators. These women expected their dating apps to protect them, or at least vet users, only to discover that Match has little to no insight on who’s using their apps.
The piece walks through individual attacks and argues that the apps have no real case for not vetting their users. The reporting positions Match as a company interested…
Continue reading…