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 .

It follows a settlement with the FTC from last month. When online platforms violate their own privacy policies to sell your photos, have no fear: They just might have to pay an undisclosed settlement fee 12 years later. According to, AI company Clarifai says it has deleted 3 million profile photos taken from dating site OkCupid in 2014. It follows a settlement reached last month between the FTC and Match Group, OkCupid's owner. The Delaware-based Clarifai reportedly certified the data deletion to the FTC on April 7.

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.

ChatGPT has already been used to write essays, tell jokes and even write best man speeches. But it seems the helpful AI bot can even make sure people on dating apps aren't lying to you about their height. Women are screenshotting photos from dating app profiles, inserting them into ChatGPT and asking it to provide an estimate of how tall they are. Justine Moore, a venture capitalist in San Francisco, said the AI's estimates are accurate to within an inch – not just for men but for women too. So it may be a good tool to size up your romantic interest before you arrange to meet.

A class-action lawsuit filed in a US federal court last Valentine's Day accuses Match Group – the owners of Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid dating apps, among others – of using a "predatory business model" and of doing everything in its power to keep users hooked, in flagrant opposition to Hinge's claim that it is "designed to be deleted". The lawsuit crystallised an ocean of dissatisfaction with the apps, and stimulated a new round of debate over their potential to harm mental health, but for scientists who study romantic relationships it sidestepped the central issue: do they work? Does using the apps increase your chances of finding your soulmate, or not? The answer is, nobody knows. "The science isn't there," says sociologist Elizabeth Bruch of the University of Michigan, who has studied online dating for a decade.

When I met my husband, who happens to be white, he told me that he was always seeing women with blonde hair on Tinder and he's not really into blondes. No matter how many times he had swiped left on blondes, the algorithms were always recommending them to him, presumably because pop culture dictates that white men prefer blondes. Luckily for us, the algorithms' tendency to stack blonde women in his swipe deck worked out in our favor because I'm a black woman who, at the time, had blonde hair. In nearly 10 years of swiping through profiles on Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and OkCupid, I learned that dating apps can provide pathways for finding friendship, adventure, romance, and sometimes, love. But there was one aspect of dating app culture that I couldn't ignore because it was often the first thing matches wanted to talk about: race.

For the record, I don't own socks with sloths on them. I have three pairs with the CNET logo on them. ChatGPT thinks I might, though, and it also thinks this fact could get me matches on Hinge, or Bumble, or any dating app that has the audacity to ask me for a random fact about myself. Click to read more Love Syncs. Here's a random fact about me: When I tested how ChatGPT might handle rewriting my dating app profile, the experimental AI chatbot tried to turn me into a cringey manic pixie dream girl who forgets to water her "jungle" of houseplants, dances to her favorite "tunes" and is looking for "a fellow weirdo" to go on *shudders* "adventures" with.

ChatGPT, a dating platform, recently started using AI software to test a new category of match questions. However, 47% of users were unsure whether they'd continue dating someone who admitted to using AI technology to first communicate. The online dating platform is experimenting with the AI technology to roll out a new category of match questions. The six questions ChatGPT yielded have already been answered by over 135,000 users.

For the record, I don't own any socks with sloths on them. I have three pairs with the CNET logo on them. ChatGPT thinks I might, though, and it also thinks this fact could get me matches on Hinge, or Bumble, or any dating app that has the audacity to ask me for a random fact about myself. Click to read more Love Syncs. Here's a random fact about me: When I tested how ChatGPT might handle rewriting my dating app profile, the experimental AI chatbot tried to turn me into a cringey manic pixie dream girl who forgets to water her "jungle" of houseplants, dances to her favorite "tunes" and is looking for "a fellow weirdo" to go on *shudders* "adventures" with.