Tinder launches mandatory face verification feature to weed out bots and scammers
Wednesday, Tinder has announced that it is rolling out a mandatory face verification tool for new users in the US to help combat the spread of fake profiles and weed out “bad actors.”
Tinder claims the mandatory face integration feature, called Face Check, is the first of its kind on a major dating app. During the registration process, new members complete a “vitality check” by taking a short video selfie within the app. The procedure collects and stores an encrypted map of information about the user’s facial shape. “We don’t store an image of your face, and that’s not image recognition, it’s data points about your face shape that are converted into a mathematical hash,” says Yoel Roth, head of trust and safety at Match Group, which owns Tinder. Tinder then uses the “hash” to check if the new sign-up matches an account that already exists on Tinder.
Face Check is currently available to users in California, which Texas and other states will follow.
In a press releaseRoth said the measure “sets a new standard for trust and safety across the dating industry” and “helps address one of the toughest issues online, knowing if someone is real…while adding meaningful hurdles that are difficult for bad actors to circumvent.”
The company defines “bad actors” as accounts that engage in deceptive behavior, including spam, fraud, and bots. Currently, 98 percent of Tinder’s content moderation processes address fake accounts, fraud, and spam. “There is a lot of comprehensive trust and safety work we do at Tinder that focuses on this challenge.”
Roth says it’s “a huge improvement in our ability to address abuse at scale. You can get new phone numbers, new email addresses, new devices — you can’t really get a new face.”
The company recognizes that requiring new members to scan their faces might be seen as a privacy issue, but “in theory, if someone had access to every one of these hashes that were generated, there wouldn’t really be anything they could do.”
Previous verification methods for the application were voluntary. Members may, depending on their jurisdiction, choose to verify their profiles through a photo or ID process. Other dating apps like Bumble also use facial recognition software to allow daters to be verified, but on a voluntary basis.
When asked what the app plans to do about existing fake profiles, since Face Check only applies to new users, Roth said the technology is most effective at curbing “the biggest problem we care about, which is the mass creation of new accounts.”