How Much Are Dating Apps Doing To Protect You From Sex Offenders?

It seems that phones are the de facto way to do anything these days — dating, included. One study found that around 40 percent of people in new, heterosexual relationships met online; another reported that as of 2018, at least 5 million Residents of the United States had used dating apps, and about 30 percent of these users were between the ages of 18 and 29. And while most people feel positively about using apps to meet other people, there’s little statistics about any actual risk involved in putting yourself out there in the quest to find true love, a cuddle buddy, or anything in between.


A new investigative report from ProPublica, BuzzFeed, and Columbia Journalism Investigations (CJI) published Tuesday (December 2) underscores that risk. Reporters spoke to a couple of females who allege that dating apps and sites like Tinder, Plenty of Fish, and Match had connected them with users who would ultimately prove to be predatory. Some boys (and they were almost all males) had been accused and some days convicted of sexual assault; a few of these cases concerned registered sex offenders, whose records ostensibly would have been surfaced in a background check.


The report asserts that because dating apps are either unable, or unwilling to vet users who may have criminal pasts, “the lack of a uniform policy...Leaves users prone to sexual assault.”


And while Plenty of Fish’s terms of service makes users promise they are not “required to register as a sex offender with any state, federal or local sex offender registry” and have not committed “a felony or indictable offense (or crime of similar severity), a sex crime, or any crime associated with violence,” the agency “does not conduct criminal background or identity verification checks on its users or otherwise inquire into the background of its users.” Tinder does not conduct background checks, either, though it identically makes users promise they “have never been convicted of or pled no contest to a felony, a sex crime, or any crime connected with violence, and that [the user is] not required to register as a sex offender with any state, federal or local sex offender registry” prior to signing up.


Both organizations are owned by the Match Group, a umbrella sort that owns a total of 45 dating platforms, including Match, OkCupid, and Hinge. Of these dozens of firms, only Match purports to conduct background checks on users with any regularity; most of the firms that allocate free services, and are ostensibly the most obtainable to users, do not.


According to the report, CJI “analyzed more than 150 incidents of sexual assault connected with dating apps,” which have primarily occurred “in the past five years and while in the app users’ first in-person meeting, in parking lots, apartments and dorm rooms. Most victims, almost all girls, met their male attackers through Tinder, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish or Match.”


The report also noticed that “in 10% of the incidents, dating platforms matched their users with someone who'd been accused or convicted of sexual assault at least once,” though “only a fraction of those cases involved a registered sex offender. But the analysis suggests that Match’s screening policy has helped to prevent the problem: Almost all of those cases implicated Match Group’s free apps; the only service that scours sex offender registries, Match, had none.”


A number of ladies told CJI that they had announced abusers to the platforms on which they had met them, either shortly soon following the assailant had attacked them, or immediately after they noticed the same or a new profile featuring that assailant’s information.


In a statement supplied to MTV News, a Match spokesperson mentioned the organization “[does] not tolerate sex offenders on our site and the implication that we know about such offenders on our site and don't fight to keep them off is as outrageous as it is false. We use a network of industry-leading equipment, systems and processes and spend millions of dollars annually to prevent, monitor and remove bad actors – including registered sex offenders – from our apps.” A separate statement supplied to CJI alleged that the 157 reports the sort had studied was “a relatively small quantity of the tens of millions of people using one of our dating services,” though they conceded that “any incident of misconduct or criminal behavior is one also many.”


“As technology evolves, we'll continue to aggressively deploy new equipment to eradicate bad actors, including users of our free products like Tinder, Plenty of Fish and OkCupid where we are not able to obtain sufficient and reliable statistics to create meaningful background checks possible,” the spokesperson told MTV News. “A positive and safe user experience is our top priority, and we are devoted to realizing that objective every day.”


Tinder currently provides a user’s safety guide for both on-app and in-person interactions, which focuses largely on how people can protect their own safety; a paragraph about the continuous and passionate nature of consent outsources to RAINN’s guidelines. The business also makes users promise that they plan to not “bully, ‘stalk,’ intimidate, assault, harass, mistreat or defame any person,” and stipulates that it “reserves the correct to investigate and/or terminate [an] account without a refund of any purchases if [a user] violated this Agreement, misused the Service or behaved in a way that Tinder regards as inappropriate or illegal, including actions or communications that occur on or off the Service.”


Nevertheless as ProPublica points out, it’s notoriously complicated to monitor whether users violate those rules or break those promises unless survivors of harassment or assault self-report — and if a perpetrator unmatches with you before you do that, you generally lose access to messages that might bolster your claims. Moreover, fewer than one in four incidents of sexual assault are ever announced to police, and survivors have a host of valid reasons as to why they might pick not to formally report.


Neither Tinder nor its parent order Match responded to MTV News’s request for comment as to whether the corporations are currently taking steps to more actively inform its users about consent; laws associated with sexual assault vary from state to state, which can make it hard to regulate dating apps that issue their services nationally or internationally. Most dating apps contain language in their TOS that absolves them of culpability should someone act in bad faith against another user.


That much fine print does little to assuage several users’ valid concerns about safety. In an MTV Tips study released in October, 84 percent of female respondents who use dating apps mentioned they are concerned about matching with and meeting a person who turns out to be predatory; 60 percent of male respondents noted the same concern. “Meeting somebody that you have no idea who they are, no idea what they’re capable of… it’s scary,” one 25-year-old mentioned. Even so, 62 percent of people still believe dating apps are a higher end option to blind dates.