Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series Here are the best apps for finding a casual, low-stress connection this summer. Tabitha Britt is an award-winning freelance journalist, editor, and SEO/AEO strategist. Aside from reviewing dating apps and sex toys for Mashable, Tabitha is also the founding editor-in-chief of DO YOU ENDO -- a digital magazine by individuals with endometriosis, for individuals with endometriosis. She has a Master's degree in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism from The New School for Social Research and is a grad of Sextech School. You can find more of her work in various online publications, including,, and . Editors and writers independently select products unless marked Sponsored or Promoted. Sponsored content is a paid ad, while content marked Promoted is chosen by Ziff Davis leadership. We may earn an affiliate commission if you buy through our links. Promoted cards do not include input from individual authors. These are the tech, tools, and products -- from laptops to e-readers, from earbuds to robovacs, and more -- that Mashable ranks best in class. In the age of on-demand everything, it's no surprise that we can get dates (and I use that term loosely) with the tap of a button. Thanks to classic hookup apps like Tinder and newcomers like Pure, finding a sexy new friend can be as straightforward as ordering a pizza. That's about the same as your pizza -- hit or miss, depending on the time of day, where you're located, and how you are. SEE ALSO: Is AdultFriendFinder the best dating site for Gen Z? Fortunately, you've got me, your resident dating app expert (though I prefer modern-day Carrie Bradshaw), to guide you to the promised land, aka the best hookup apps. I've spent the past three years (yes, years) researching, downloading, and testing dozens of the top dating apps to find the best ones for all kinds of daters, including the one-night-stand crowd. I also consulted a helpful panel of sex and relationship experts to make sure my picks are solid. My number one rule is to be brutally honest about what you want. Are you here for a good time?

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable Selects Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag VidCon with Mashable All Series We tested the safest, most effective apps for finding a real partner. Tabitha Britt is an award-winning freelance journalist, editor, and SEO/AEO strategist. Aside from reviewing dating apps and sex toys for Mashable, Tabitha is also the founding editor-in-chief of DO YOU ENDO -- a digital magazine by individuals with endometriosis, for individuals with endometriosis. She has a Master's degree in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism from The New School for Social Research and is a grad of Sextech School. You can find more of her work in various online publications, including,, and . Editors and writers independently select products unless marked Sponsored or Promoted. Sponsored content is a paid ad, while content marked Promoted is chosen by Ziff Davis leadership. We may earn an affiliate commission if you buy through our links. Promoted cards do not include input from individual authors. These are the tech, tools, and products -- from laptops to e-readers, from earbuds to robovacs, and more -- that Mashable ranks best in class. Being a woman on the internet has never been easy, but trying to find a genuine connection on a dating app in 2026? Between the emboldened creeps, the swipe fatigue, and surprisingly convincing AI profiles, it's enough to make you wonder if applying for is the more sane alternative. The reality is, dating right now comes with a set of challenges --especially when it comes to safety. A 2026 survey from SSRS found that 55 percent of women believe meeting someone in person from a dating app is unsafe, compared to just 30 percent of men. We're dealing with a constant barrage of low-effort hey messages, unsolicited dick pics, men who are married, and the underlying safety concerns men just don't have to think about .

Look Up Say More Versus Creator Hub Switch Off Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Trending Now Safety Net In My Bag VidCon with Mashable Back to School Furtastic All Series The app seems to be constantly evolving. Anna Iovine is the associate editor of features at Mashable. Previously, as the sex and relationships reporter, she covered topics ranging from dating apps to pelvic pain. Before Mashable, Anna was a social editor at VICE and freelanced for publications such as Slate and the Columbia Journalism Review. Follow her on Bluesky .

Face Check will scan new members' faces to ensure they don't match existing profiles. The move comes as romance scams continue to proliferate, with billions lost over the last decade. On Wednesday, Tinder announced that it was rolling out a mandatory facial verification tool for new users in the US to help combat the spread of fake profiles and weed out "bad actors." Tinder claims its mandatory facial integration feature, called Face Check, is a first for a major dating app. During the sign up process, new members complete a "liveness check" by taking a short video selfie within the app.

A new investigation from The Markup claims the parent company of Tinder, Hinge, OKCupid and other dating apps turns a blind eye to allegedly abusive users on its platforms. The 18-month investigation found instances in which users who were repeatedly reported for drugging or assaulting their dates remained on the apps. One such case involves a Colorado-based cardiologist named Stephen Matthews. Over several years, multiple women on Match's platforms reported him for drugging or raping them. Despite these reports, his Tinder profile was at one point given Standout status, reserved for popular profiles and often requiring in-app currency to interact with.

The Dating Apps Reporting Project is an 18-month investigation. It was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network and the Markup, now a part of CalMatters, and co-published with the Guardian and the 19th. When a young woman in Denver met up with a smiling cardiologist she matched with on the dating app Hinge, she had no way of knowing that the company behind the app had already received reports from two other women who had accused him of rape. She met the 34-year-old doctor with green eyes and thinning hair at Highland Tap & Burger, a sports bar in a trendy neighborhood. It went well enough that she accepted an invitation to go back to his apartment. As she emerged from his bathroom, he handed her a tequila soda. What transpired over the next 24 hours, according to court testimony, reads like every person's dating app nightmare. After sipping the drink, the woman started to lose control. She fell to the ground, and the man started to film her. He put her in a headlock, kissing her forehead; she struggled to free herself but managed to grab her things and leave. He followed her out the door, holding her shoes and trying to force her back inside, but she was able to call an Uber, vomiting in the car on the way home. She woke up at home, soaking wet on her bathroom floor, the key to her house still in her door. She continued vomiting for hours.

Mere moments after his swearing in Monday, President Donald Trump made a proclamation to attendees of his inauguration: "It shall henceforth be the policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female." Trump then signed an executive order disparaging what the White House called "gender ideology" and claiming that a person's sex is "not changeable and [is] grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality." Trump's order, which was widely seen as an unscientific attempt to roll back the rights of transgender and gender-expansive people, also instructs federal agencies "to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder's sex," rather than their gender identity. It was one of 78 orders signed on Monday, some of which were part of Trump's attempts to end Biden-era policies that "socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life." While the executive order only affects federal policy, the broader implications are vast.

Let a digital sidekick take the strain. While user fatigue may be setting in – reports suggest a notable decline in usage – the world's biggest online dating company is launching an artificial intelligence assistant that it claims will "transform" online dating. Match Group, the technology company with the world's largest portfolio of dating platforms, has announced it is increasing investment in AI with new products coming in March 2025. An as yet unnamed AI assistant will perform core dating tasks such as selecting the photos it calculates will garner the most responses and recommend what prompts and information to put in a bio. It will also help a user choose the perfect partner.

"Designed to be deleted" is the tagline of one of the UK's most popular dating apps. Hinge promises that it is "the dating app for people who want to get off dating apps" – the place to find lasting love. But critics say modern dating is in crisis. They claim that dating apps, which have been downloaded hundreds of millions of times worldwide, are "exploitative" and are designed not to be deleted but to be addictive, to retain users in order to create revenue. An Observer investigation has found that dating apps are increasingly pushing users to buy extras that have been likened to "gambling products" and can cost hundreds of pounds a year.

Customer data is often stored as records in Customer Relations Management systems (CRMs). Data which is manually entered into such systems by one of more users over time leads to data replication, partial duplication or fuzzy duplication. This in turn means that there no longer a single source of truth for customers, contacts, accounts, etc. Downstream business processes become increasing complex and contrived without a unique mapping between a record in a CRM and the target customer. Current methods to detect and de-duplicate records use traditional Natural Language Processing techniques known as Entity Matching. In this paper we show how using the latest advancements in Large Language Models and Generative AI can vastly improve the identification and repair of duplicated records. On common benchmark datasets we find an improvement in the accuracy of data de-duplication rates from 30 percent using NLP techniques to almost 60 percent using our proposed method.