INTHEBLACK February 2022 - Magazine - Page 60
F E AT U R E
// D AT I N G A P P S
“W H AT DAT I N G S I T ES A R E D O I N G N OW I S U S I N G A I F O R A
M U C H M O R E G R A N U L A R G E T T I N G-TO-K N OW-YO U P RO C ES S,
S O T H E P E RS O N S I G N I N G U P B E C O M ES V E RY W E L L K N OW N
I N A L L S O RTS O F P E RS O N A L I T Y D I M E N S I O N S.”
DR DAVID TUFFLEY, GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY
“In the early days of online dating, people
would fill out a questionnaire, and the
company would try to match them up with
someone, but people aren’t always entirely
honest in questionnaires,” he says. “There’s
a tendency to portray yourself in the most
positive light.
“What dating sites are doing now is using
AI for a much more granular getting-toknow-you process, so the person signing up
becomes very well known in all sorts
of personality dimensions.”
Match.com’s chatbot Lara, for instance,
will have a conversation with you to help
find singles with interests similar to your
own. Apps like Badoo use facial recognition
to suggest a partner that may look like your
celebrity crush. Tuffley says some sites can
even examine your public posts on social
media platforms to gauge your attitudes
and interests.
“There are certainly privacy issues around
this, and the key thing is informed consent,”
60 ITB February 2022
he says. “If a person gives their explicit
permission to allow the company’s AI to
look at their Facebook or LinkedIn pages,
for instance, and they understand the
implications of that, then that is considered
ethical.”
“The problem is that this information is
often buried in the terms and conditions,
and people may not read them – they just
click to show consent,” adds Tuffley. “This
may be considered a rather disingenuous
way of getting informed consent.”
CRITICAL MASS
There are thousands of dating apps on the
market, but Brooks says there would be
many more if it were easier for them to get
onto app stores.
“App stores are a bit more restrictive these
days, because they’ve recognised that there’s
so many dating apps,” he says. “They’re not
actually serving their users by loading up the
chaff, and this is a good thing, because when
users see a dating app on the first couple of
pages of an app store, it’s generally going to
be at critical mass.”
Gaining critical mass is the greatest
challenge for any dating start-up, says
Brooks.
“Essentially, they are ‘selling’ people to
people, but when there is nothing to sell
and nobody to interact with, it’s a black
hole,” he says. “That’s why it’s very important
for dating start-ups to come out of the gate
running and to get to critical mass quickly.”
This is where “white labellers” come in –
these are, essentially, dating companies that
help anybody to start a dating website or
app by sharing a common user database.
White Label Dating, for instance, is
a leading off-the-shelf software-as-aservice business that gives other companies
the tools to run their own online dating
sites, including dating software, payment
processing, customer support and a database
of potential dating customers.
Imagine you have signed up to a dating
site and have indicated that you enjoy golf. If
the site is white labelled, your profile might
then also appear on, say, Golfing Singles, if
there were such a site.
This presents a number of privacy issues,
says Brooks.
“When you sign up to a white label dating
site, you might not know that it’s a white
label site, but in fact it was all in the terms
and conditions that you agreed to. It may
look like your profile has been ported, but it
hasn’t, because it is on a common database.
It’s sitting in exactly the same spot – it’s just
been displayed in multiple front ends.”
SAFE SPACE?
A March 2021 survey of 1000 members of
the online dating industry by Global Dating
Insights shows the biggest challenges facing
dating apps are associated with safety.