Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Owned by Match Group, Track Reports of Rape. Why Don’t They Warn Users?

Match Group, the tech company that owns Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge, Tinder and other popular dating services, has known for years which users have been accused of sexual assault and rape, but kept those reports hidden from others on the app, according to a new investigation. Match Group controls half of the world’s online dating market and facilitates meetups for millions of people in scores of countries around the world. “Match Group is aware of a lot of the scale of the harm on their apps. They actually track this on their backend,” says journalist Emily Elena Dugdale, one of the authors of the investigation produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. “Similar to many tech companies, there’s really little regulation that requires them to actually tell you what’s going on on their apps.” We also speak with whistleblower Michael Lawrie, the former head of user safety and advocacy at OkCupid. He says he quit after his concerns about user safety went unheeded. “I was seeing a lot of stuff,” Lawrie says. “It became impossible for me to carry on working there, ethically and morally.”