Security News > 2020 > January > Tinder to get panic button, catfish-fighting facial recognition
In an effort to keep users safe - and when it comes to Tinder or other dating apps, that means keeping them from being raped, murdered or even, in one horrific case, dismembered - Tinder is incorporating a panic button into the app, as well as Artificial Intelligence-enabled photo recognition to help stop catfishing.
The news about the panic button and other new safety features was announced on Thursday by Tinder's parent company, Match Group, which also owns pretty much all of the popular dating/hookup apps, including Match, PlentyOfFish, Meetic, OkCupid, OurTime, Pairs, and Hinge.
Users will be required to hand over a lot of personal data, including access to their geophysical location and details about who they're hooking up with: specifically, users will have to enter the name of the person they plan to meet, as well as when and where, in a Tinder Timeline feature.
It wasn't the first time that Tinder has been scraped, either: it also happened in 2017 when a researcher working for Google subsidiary Kaggle swiped 40,000 Tinder images in order to train AI. He not-so-charmingly referred to the Tinder users as "Hoes" in his source code, for whatever that's worth.
At any rate, besides catfish-fighting, human-assisted facial recognition and the new panic button, Tinder will also be acquiring a harassment detection prompt - called "Does This Bother You?" - that will be powered by machine learning, as well as a revamped in-app Tinder Safety Center.