China: Dating apps turn hot during viral outbreak

BEIJING — Zhang Xiaojing is a 33-year-old accountant for a foreign trade company in Beijing who has been spending time scrolling through her dating apps since the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Bottom line, Zhang is looking to find a boyfriend and get married as soon as possible.


“I used to participate in some offline dating activities during the weekends, but almost all gatherings have been prohibited. Cinemas and bars were shut down to curb the spread of the deadly virus. I have to remain indoors to avoid getting infected.”

Zhang lives alone and feels very bored so she downloaded several online dating apps. They included Momo and Tantan in a bid to make new friends, and to give her some relief from the stress and loneliness.

She noted that Tantan’s way of finding dates, unlike traditional dating websites, is more interesting and simple.

“You just browse the profiles recommended to you based on your location, distance and gender preferences. Swipe right if you like someone, and swipe left to show you are not interested.”


“I chat only with the people that I am matched with, and can also choose to hide my contacts. The app adds other functionalities which people can use for free. For instance, I can play games, upload pictures or texts and share videos on it.”

For Zhang, online romance in the time of the contagion has become more than just finding love. It is also a source of comfort and connection.

Online dating apps have seen a significant increase in usage due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Industry experts said the “cloud matchmaking” method, which includes livestreaming and short videos formats which comply with the habits of users and satisfy the needs of self-presentation, is gaining tractions among singles.

A report released by mobile dating app Tantan said the average time people spent on the app in early and mid February increased over 30 percent compared with the average usage during normal times. The number of users surged 60 percent during the peak hour which often runs from midnight to 1 am.


During the outbreak, those born after the period around 1995 and after 2000 have become the top users of Tantan. They recorded a more than 20 percent increase in messages sent and daily matches. Another notable fact is that the number of older users who came back rose by 25.9 percent compared with the level during normal times.

Founded in 2014, Tantan focuses on one-on-one interactions and targets students and white-collar workers. Women accounted for nearly half of the total users. So far, it has 10.5 million daily active users and 35 million monthly active users.

Data from iResearch Consulting Group showed the revenue of China’s online dating and matchmaking industry will increase from 4 billion yuan ($567 million) in 2017 to 5.3 billion yuan in 2020.

For singles, the pressure to get married usually increases when they return home during the Spring Festival holiday for family reunions. Their parents, grandparents and other relatives badger them about their personal lives to nosily inquire why they have not gotten married.

Zhenai.com, a popular matchmaking application website, said its active users reached 10 million during the Lunar New Year holiday (Jan 24-Feb 2), an increase of 39.3 percent compared with the same period of last year. More than 10,300 people found highly compatible matches on the app.

Wu Linguang, CEO of online matchmaking and dating platform Baihe Jiayuan Network Group Co, said video and livestreaming dating services have been launched to lure customers during the epidemic.

“Generally speaking, the emotional demand of singles reaches a peak on Valentine’s Day and lasts until the end of February,” Wu said.

Statistics from the company showed the time users spend on video dating rose 29.8 percent during the Spring Festival holiday, compared with the data from the festive season last year. The average usage time skyrocketed 93 percent versus the time from the same period a year ago.

Some 50 percent of single men and 33 percent of single women were lonely as they could not go out during the outbreak, it added.

Surfing the internet has become a major way to help ease their anxiety, with 30 percent of singles keen about making friends online. About 30 percent of men and 41 percent of women have switched from attending offline activities to online dating.


“The epidemic has given a big boost to the online dating apps, which are usually in the off season in the first quarter and gradually gain popularity after the Spring Festival,” said Yang Xin, an analyst with Beijing-based internet consultancy Analysys.

Yang believes that with rapidly increasing traffic, mobile app companies should think of how to hang onto their customers when the pandemic ends.

-China Daily

Dating apps leak personal data, Norwegian group says

LONDON — Dating apps including Grindr, OkCupid and Tinder leak personal information to advertising tech companies in possible violation of European data privacy laws, a Norwegian consumer group said in a report Tuesday.

The Norwegian Consumer Council said it found “serious privacy infringements” in its analysis of how shadowy online ad companies track and profile smartphone users.


The council, a government-funded nonprofit group, commissioned cybersecurity company Mnemonic to study 10 Android mobile apps. It found that the apps sent user data to at least 135 different third party services involved in advertising or behavioral profiling.

“The situation is completely out of control,” the council said, urging European regulators to enforce the continent’s strict General Data Privacy Regulation, or GDPR. It said the majority of the apps did not present users with legally-compliant consent mechanisms.

The council took action against some of the companies it examined, filing formal complaints with Norway’s data protection authority against Grindr, Twitter-owned mobile app advertising platform MoPub and four ad tech companies. Grindr sent data including users’ GPS location, age and gender to the other companies, the council said.

Twitter said it disabled Grindr’s MoPub account and is investigating the issue “to understand the sufficiency of Grindr’s consent mechanism.”


Period tracker app MyDays and virtual makeup app Perfect 365 were also among the apps sharing personal data with ad services, the report said.

Match Group, owner of Tinder and OkCupid, said the company shares information with third parties only when it is “deemed necessary to operate its platform” with third party apps. The company said it considers the practice in line with all European and U.S. regulations.

The U.S. doesn’t have federal regulation like the GDPR, although some states, notably California, have enacted their own laws. Nine civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union of California, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Public Citizen and U.S. PIRG sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, Congress and state attorneys general of California, Texas and Oregon asking them to investigate the apps named in the report.

“Congress should use the findings of the report as a road map for a new law that ensures that such flagrant violations of privacy found in the EU are not acceptable in the U.S.,” the groups said in a statement.

The FTC confirmed it received the letter but declined to comment further. The creators of the MyDays, Perfect 365 and Grindr apps did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

source: technology.inquirer.net

Dating app fires back at billboard linking it to STD spread

LOS ANGELES— A popular dating app is telling a Los Angeles-based AIDS health care group to take down a billboard that links dating apps with sexual diseases.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation said Monday that it received a cease-and-desist letter from Tinder that claims the billboard falsely associates the dating app with venereal diseases.

The foundation’s billboard shows a silhouette of a man labeled “Tinder” face-to-face with a woman labeled “chlamydia.” A silhouette of a man labeled “Grindr,” a gay dating app, faces a male silhouette labeled “gonorrhea.”

The foundation says it sent a letter to Tinder saying it will not take down the billboard.

The foundation provides health care to HIV and AIDS patients and says its campaign is designed to remind dating-app users about the risk of casual sex.

source: technology.inquirer.net

Love at first click

After two years of unsuccessfully dating the conventional way, Hong Kong-based writer Wendy Tang finally decided to give dating apps a try.

“I used Lovestruck, OKCupid and Tinder. On OKCupid, there were always guys sending me weird messages. I paid for Lovestruck and went out on two dates, but there was no chemistry,” said Tang—now 30 and still single.

She found someone she liked on Tinder and they dated for three weeks. He was visiting Hong Kong at the time and had been trying to find new friends on Tinder. But the relationship did not work out.

Tang quit Tinder after about a year. “It’s quite boring,” she said. “I had to constantly swipe and look for possible matches and, even if we both liked each other, the conversation was always the same and meaningless, with a boring start and boring exchanges.”

Tinder is among the hottest dating apps nowadays, with an estimated 50 million active users worldwide.

Users get a limited number of matches sent to them every 12 hours and can swipe right to indicate they like the proposed match or left to reject. A private chatroom will be initiated if a mutual like happens.

In April, Tang followed a friend’s recommendation and started using Coffee Meets Bagel, which only delivers one “high quality” match—the “bagel”—each day. The app was founded in New York three years ago, and launched in Hong Kong last March after becoming hugely popular in the US.

Tang said she trusts the app more, as it refers to mutual friends on Facebook in proposing matches and constantly learns users’ preferences and alters the algorithm accordingly.

She went out on two dates recently with men she met through the app. “So far it’s not bad, but I have to wait and see,” she said.

Dawoon Kang, one of the three founders of Coffee Meets Bagel, feels the dating app market has become a frustrating place.

“Millennials are extremely busy, and no one wants to dedicate time to meeting some strangers—and if the date doesn’t work out, you feel like you’ve wasted a lot of time,” she said.

“Very often you spend a lot of time swiping on apps that never end up in fruition, which is an actual meet-up.”

In its three years, Coffee Meets Bagel claims to have facilitated over 25 million matches in the US, with more than 20,000 couples starting a relationship and 200 getting married or engaged. It also generated nearly 10,000 downloads in Hong Kong in three months.

Let’s do lunch

Another app with a similar “one match per day” approach, LunchClick, made its Hong Kong debut in June.

Its Singapore-based founder and a matchmaker, Violet Lim, set up matchmaking company Lunch Actually in 2004 in Singapore, and her company is now Asia’s premier dating agency.

Unlike Coffee Meets Bagel, there is no chat function on LunchClick. Instead, if both sides click to “like” each other, they will be interacting through a Q&A session, choosing from a question bank with more than 100 multiple-choice queries covering topics such as values, opinions, interests and aspirations.

The app has so far paired over 15,000 singles in Hong Kong, who have exchanged more than 32,000 Q&As, Lim said. “My experience in the matchmaking industry tells me singles don’t need chatting. They need to meet. So we designed an app that’s only for meeting. Chatting will never reduce the time before the final meet-up but only increase it,” she said.

Specially developed computer algorithms at the foundation of both apps help propose matches for users.

Studies by Coffee Meets Bagel in the US have found that if the two sides share mutual friends on Facebook, there is a 37 percent greater likelihood that they will end up meeting.

Its research also shows that Coffee Meets Bagel users based in Hong Kong have as many as 768 Faceook friends on average, compared to a global average of over 200. Other factors such as the member’s age, education level, religious and other preferences are also taken into account in Coffee Meets Bagel’s algorithm.

For LunchClick, it is mutual values that matter most. Lim said the matchmaking industry is never about just matching interests or ensuring business complementarity, or working on the principles of opposites attract—such as matching introverts with extroverts.

Instead, it is similar perspectives on issues such as family and money that lead to a happy and lasting relationship or marriage, she noted.

The computer algorithms are constantly modified and updated based on user feedback and reactions toward proposed matches.

This way, the apps are more likely to get a precise idea of individual preferences and pick matches based on the choices they actually make instead of what users may say they like.

However, can big data really help people find their significant other on a mobile platform? Denise Tang Tse-shang, assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong, pointed out that in the final analysis computers can never make decisions for people.

“Technology has enabled us to chat with strangers online without any emotional boundaries. But speaking of meet-ups, there should be no direct judgment on whether different apps are effective or not—as the users themselves will have to make the final decision while taking into account any possible risks,” she said.

That is probably why both apps have labeled themselves as “female-centric,” and they use multiple approaches to filter out fake accounts by verifying every new registration case by case.

Hong Kong’s lopsided gender ratio of 858 men to 1,000 women might have had an impact on the dating dynamics of the city, with Coffee Meets Bagel’s survey revealing 62 percent of women find dating in Hong Kong difficult, compared to only 45 percent of men.

It also found that in general users of both genders in Hong Kong will like one out of three matches they get.

LunchClick, on the other hand, spotted that while there are more women customers for Lunch Actually’s offline services, the app ended up showing a reversed gender split.

As technology progresses and more new ideas appear, Kang predicts an eventual transformation of the matchmaking industry.

“Several types of dating services are about to be eliminated, as there will be greater proliferation of quality matchmaking. One is the subscription model. There is no reason to pay 60 dollars a month for a service that doesn’t guarantee any results,” Kang forecast.

“Besides, although I still can see value in the traditional matchmaking services because they’re more discreet, eventually technology will replace them.” But traditional matchmakers are not intimidated by the high-tech competition.

“The human relationship between men and women is far more complicated and unpredictable than we think,” said Rachael Chan, founder of Rachael and Smith Matchmakers, a local agency.

“Those who claim to have no time to look for dates, and those who are truly buried in their work, which leads to their remaining single, won’t spend one hour on apps after they get off work.”

Either way, love is not found in a rush. Wendy Tang said she would rather spend more time on having a healthy work-life balance, which she considers the most effective way to meet new faces. To her, apps are no more than just another ordinary platform to find love.

source: technology.inquirer.net

Swipe right for Ms. Right: The rise of dating apps

NEW YORK — So, a lady walks into a bar…Wait, scratch that. A lady takes out her phone. With a left swipe of her finger she dismisses Alex, 25 and Robert, 48. She swipes right when a photo of James, 24, pops up. It’s a match. James had swiped right too. They chat, and make plans to meet. They’re only three miles apart, after all.

Welcome to the new world of dating. As the near-constant use of smartphones proliferates and as people grow more comfortable with disclosing their location, a new class of mobile dating applications is emerging that spans a range as broad as human desire itself. Millennials, busy with school, jobs and social lives, say the apps save time and let users filter out the undesirables, based on a few photos, words and Facebook connections. Unlike the dating websites of yore, with endless profiles to browse and lengthy messages to compose, newer apps offer a sense of immediacy and simplicity that in many ways harkens back to the good old days of just walking up to a pretty stranger and making small talk.

As with potential mates, there’s an array to choose from.

In the US, online community ChristianMingle will “find God’s match for you.” Mobile application Hinge’s promise hinges on its ability to hook you up with friends of friends. Coffee Meets Bagel, meanwhile, will present you with just one potential mate at noon every day. Dattch, with a Pinterest-like interface, is for women seeking women. For men looking for men, there’s Grindr, Jack’d, Scruff, Boyahoy and many more. Revealer will let you hear a person’s voice and only show photos if you’re both interested.

The darling dating app du jour for Americans is Tinder, helped by its simple interface, a host of celebrity users and a popularity boost from Sochi Olympic athletes who used it to hook up during the Winter Games.

Tinder, like many dating apps, requires people to log in using their Facebook profiles, which users say adds a certain level of trust. Facebook, after all, is built on knowing people’s real identities. Your Tinder photos are your Facebook photos. Users can reject or accept potential mates with a left or right swipe of their finger. If both people swipe right on Tinder, the app flashes “It’s a match!” and the pair can exchange messages.

Because messages can only come from a person you’ve “right-swiped,” unwanted advances are filtered out. The system avoids one of the more vexing problems of older-generation dating websites, where users, especially women, can become inundated with messages from unwelcome suitors. They also offer a generation raised on Google and social media a chance to do background checks on potential mates.

“If you are in a bar and a guy comes to talk to you, you are immediately going to be freaked out and you don’t want to talk to them because they are drunk,” says Melissa Ellard, 23, who uses Hinge and says she wouldn’t have gone on a date in the past six months were it not for the app. “When you are using the app, you get to look at their picture and see background information. You get to decide whether you want to continue it or not. When I meet someone, I want to know everything about them before I go on a date with them.”

While they are still new, dating apps — used for anything from one-night-stands to serious dating, and even finding new friends while traveling — are emerging as the use of older dating websites is moving into the mainstream. A recent Pew study found that some 9 percent of US adults say they’ve used dating sites or mobile dating apps, up from 3 percent in 2008. Of those who are “single and looking,” the number jumps to 38 percent, according to the 2013 survey. The crowd trends slightly younger, with the largest group of users between 25 and 44. Clearly, many people have grown comfortable with online dating just as they have with shopping, banking and booking travel over the Internet.

Cue the cries of “the lost art of courtship” and the “rise of hookup culture” from older generations, who harbor selective memories of the more analog hookup culture of their youth.

“There is a general digital fear,” says Glenn Platt, professor of interactive media studies at Miami University. “People are happy to giggle and watch Barney in ‘How I Met Your Mother” who hooks up with people based on looks. But somehow taking that same behavior and placing it in a digital context has a stigma attached to it. Even though, in that context you are more likely to get a better match, more information, a person’s real name.”

Even Facebook is getting in on the action, from a more platonic angle. Last month, the world’s biggest online social network launched a feature called “nearby friends,” which lets users see which of their Facebook friends are near them at any given moment.

Despite the growing acceptance, the online and app-based dating market is small. Research firm IBIS World estimates that the dating services industry will hit $2.2 billion in revenue this year. Internet conglomerate IAC/InteractiveCorp has the biggest chunk of the market with a 27 percent share. The New York Company owns traditional dating sites such as OKCupid, Match.com and Chemistry.com, as well as Tinder. IAC has a market value of just $5.2 billion, less than a third of Twitter’s.

Jared Fliesler, general partner at the venture capital fund Matrix Partners, believes companies have only just begun to tap into people’s willingness to “pay” to find love, a phenomenon that extends well beyond dating apps. After all, he points out, singles already spend lots of money on texts, calls, drinks, food, gifts and everything else associated with the dating game.

“Despite it being a slightly difficult category in which to rise venture funding, consumers spend more time, money, and mental energy on trying to find love than pretty much anything in life, and the desire to be loved is universal,” says Fliesler. “So there will always be demand.”

Creators of some of the more ambitious apps say they have their sights set beyond romantic matchmaking to what they call “social discovery,” helping people meet business connections, new friends while traveling or moving to a new city. Tinder’s co-founder, Justin Mateen, insists that his creation is not a hookup app and wasn’t created to facilitate one-night stands.

Just don’t tell that to Tinder users.

“I used Tinder before I found out about Hinge and it was creep central, it was just weird,” says Ellard, who lives outside Boston, runs a startup, works in jewelry sales and has a fashion radio segment. “I used it for a few months but instead of looking for someone it was more like a funny joke,” she says.

For some, though, Tinder can be liberating. Platt says the app “equalizes gender power,” and notes that he hears as many of his female students talk about it as male ones.

“Everyone has the same finger and ability to click,” he says. “It’s not like the guy buys the drink.”

Jenny Lewin, 21, a student of Platt’s who’s an intern at San Francisco-based Coffee Meets Bagel, thinks it’s inevitable that as dating apps enter the mainstream, they will become more accepted and people will be more open about using them.

“I think a lot of people say that our generation doesn’t know how to talk to people face to face, that we don’t know how to communicate, which I totally disagree with,” says Lewin. “I would be much more likely to click a ‘heart’ on Tinder or a ‘like’ on Coffee Meets Bagel to say I am interested in a guy than to walk up to him and say I am interested.”

source: technology.inquirer.net