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.

Modern dating can be severed into two eras: before the swipe, and after. When Tinder and other dating apps took off in the early 2010s, they unleashed a way to more easily access potential love interests than ever before. By 2017, about five years after Tinder introduced the swipe, more than a quarter of different-sex couples were meeting on apps and dating websites, according to a study led by the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. Suddenly, saying "We met on Hinge" was as normal as saying "We met in college" or "We met through a friend." The share of couples meeting on apps has remained pretty consistent in the years since his 2017 study, Rosenfeld told me.

Yoel Roth has spent the past 16 months recovering from a very bad, very public breakup. For two chaotic weeks after Elon Musk took control of Twitter in October 2022, Roth clung on to his job as the platform's head of trust and safety. He even won public praise from Musk for his "high integrity." But Roth ended up walking away from the job that November, and he was quickly targeted with a torrent of harassment, driven partly by lurid accusations from Musk himself and also by "The Twitter files," a dump of internal documents that revealed how Roth and other executives grappled with content moderation decisions. Roth has kept busy consulting, teaching, and studying decentralized social networks (he now posts on Bluesky).

Dating apps are supposedly'designed to be deleted,' but a new class action lawsuit claims the apps are instead'designed to be addictive.' The lawsuit, filed on Valentine's Day against Match Group which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish, accused the company of using'psychological manipulation' like push notifications, rewards, and punishments to guarantee users keep swiping right. The app is designed to turn users into'addicts' who are enticed by the game-like play-to-play loop, the lawsuit claimed, accusing Match Group of prioritizing profit over promises to help users find love. Match sells subscription plans to remove like limits and see who likes you with Tinder offering its Gold package for 140 for six months or 40 for one month and its Platinum package for 50 per month or 180 for six months. The lawsuit claims that if users were content with the basic app features, they wouldn't need to purchase the additional subscription when they reach their'like limit.'