Tinder launches mandatory facial verification to weed out bots and scammers
on wednesday Tinder announced that it is introducing a mandatory facial verification tool for new users in the US to help fight 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 in the app. This method collects and stores an encrypted map of information about the user’s face shape. Joel Roth, head of Trust and Safety for Match Group, which owns Tinder, says: “We don’t store an image of your face, it’s not photo recognition, it’s data about your face shape that’s turned into a mathematical hash. Tinder then uses that “hash” to check if the new signup matches an account that already exists on Tinder.
Face Check is currently available to users in California, with Texas and other states to follow.
Roth said in a news release that the measure “creates a new standard for trust and safety in the dating industry” and “helps solve one of the hardest problems online, knowing if someone is real … while adding meaningful barriers that are difficult for bad actors to circumvent.”
The company defines “bad actors” as accounts that engage in deceptive behavior, including spamming, fraud and bots. Currently, 98% of content moderation actions on Tinder address fake accounts, fraud, and spam. There is a significant amount of our overall trust and safety work at Tinder focused on this challenge.
Roth says it’s a “significant improvement in our ability to handle scalable abuse. You can get new phone numbers, new email addresses, new devices—you can’t really get a new face.”
The company acknowledges that asking new members to scan their face might be seen as a privacy issue, but “in theory, if someone wants to access every single one of these hashes that’s created, there’s really nothing they can do.”
Previous program approval procedures were voluntary. Members, depending on their jurisdiction, can verify their profile through a selfie or ID process. Other dating apps like Bumble also use facial recognition software to allow friends to verify their authenticity, but on a voluntary basis.
When asked what the app does about fake profiles that already exist, given that Face Check only applies to new users, Roth says the technology is more effective at curbing “the biggest problem we’re dealing with, which is the mass creation of new accounts.”
