Relationships: Facebook’s love algorithm
“Are Americans ready to trust Facebook with their dating life?” asked Sarah Perez in Tech Crunch.com. The social media giant launched its online dating platform, Facebook Dating, last week to “leverage the company’s deep insight into people’s personal data to deliver better matches than rival dating apps such as Tinder, Bumble, Match, and others.” Creating a Dating profile will be “an opt-in experience,” and your Dating activity won’t appear in the News Feed. But Facebook will use the preferences, interests, and other background info it can gauge from your activity on the site to find matches, although its recommendation algorithm remains a secret. And what you do on Facebook’s sister site, Instagram, also becomes part of the equation, with Dating pulling in Instagram photos and stories.
This sounds like a useful service, said Brian Feldman in New York magazine, except for one glaring problem: “Facebook Dating is made by Facebook.” Even if “Facebook harvests no bits of personal information from the use of its dating service, the thing is designed to get people to use the other parts” that do. If that doesn’t dissuade you, said Charlie Warzel in The New York Times, think about Facebook’s history of data breaches. Protecting your sensitive dating information is a job that Facebook “seems uniquely unqualified for.” You know what else isn’t safe? Talking to strangers on the internet, said Amanda Bartlett in the San Francisco Chronicle. Online dating is here to stay, and much of it is split between sites that offer no vetting and others geared to niche interests. Facebook Dating offers several features that are comparatively better than those of other online dating services. A “Secret Crush” feature lets you list up to nine Facebook friends you might be attracted to. “Share Your Plans” allows you to send your live location to friends in case of an emergency. The in-app messaging feature is text-only—“much to the relief of anyone who’s received an unsolicited, inappropriate image” via text.
This is not just about dating for Facebook, said Casey Newton in TheVerge.com. There’s another kind of tie-up involved. Facebook sees the regulatory vultures circling, and it’s now racing “to dissolve every possible boundary between WhatsApp, Instagram, and the flagship app.” Dating’s integration with Instagram is one big step in that direction. “If regulators try to force them” to break off those auxiliary components, “they can complain that it’s simply impossible. If Facebook succeeds, there will be no real ‘Instagram’ or ‘WhatsApp’ to speak of—there will simply be Facebook, available in a handful of different flavors.”