The Cold War on Dating Apps

I didn’t particularly want to ruffle too many feathers so soon after rejoining the Liberal Democrats. In fact, I held off writing something like this because when we all saw John Leech declare “war on dating apps” (his hyperbole, not mine) I had a feeling that after the response he got from other Lib Dems and the LGBT press that perhaps his crusade was a little silly. However, after seeing some grandiose Wikipedia edits by one of his staffers it seems that this phony war is likely to continue, so I would like to address some of the points made.

Dating app safety is something I am particularly invested in, both in terms of my career and my campaign interests. They also made it a hell of a lot easier for me as a closeted 18 year old to speak to people like me and, if I’m being entirely honest, to hook up with a relative degree of safety. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with older men who resent the fact such a channel was not available to them — meeting like-minded men in their day meant taking the very real physical risk of going to cruising grounds. Now, you can speak to somebody first and arrange a safe public space to meet. It has revolutionised the way gay/bi men interact and I have no doubt that the large gap it bridged has helped many many more men out of the closet. In countries where the state or organised thugs target gay/bi men, these apps aren’t just hookup luxuries, they are lifelines.

That’s not to say they don’t raise challenges. There will always be a risk associated with hooking up. The primary risks, should John be interested, are:

• Triangulation and trilateration: Dating apps present your (accuracy-dependent) distance from others. Although that doesn’t tell you much, by obtaining the distance you are from an individual at three different points can get you their location. Or, if you’re not one for geometry, you could simply use a location spoofer to find out whether the person is north/south and then east/west, then use trial and error with the spoofer until you get to 0m distance.
• Your security is reliant on the quality of code produced by the developers. There have been examples fairly recently of security issues with dating apps, particularly sloppiness with the API where information hidden by the user interface was still being sent back in the JSON blob. In addition, there were some reports that users were able to send messages on behalf of other users by providing their user ID, suggesting that the API was not using the session credentials.

I care about this issue so much, my partner and a couple of friends developed a prototype app that attempted to resolve them, with some extra bits of security in for gay/bi men in areas of the world it’s not too great to be gay. We won the first prize at Facebook’s hackathon for it and anybody who is interested in what we created can see it here.

This is not to say that John’s concerns aren’t valid. My personal rule for anybody meeting somebody off the Internet is to do it in a safe public space for the first time. However, Grindr being Grindr, lots of people take the risk and use it for an immediate hookup. My issue with John’s approach is his direct implication that Grindr and the like are responsible for this. In particular, there’s a bizarre proposal that safety alerts should be displayed (although John doesn’t elaborate on when these are displayed — do we display them with the T&Cs that people dismiss without reading? Do we have a Microsoft Office paperclip that emerges with “It looks like you’re meeting up for a fuck…”?). I have asked John for the evidence that safety alerts would have prevented the assaults he has stated are “linked” to dating apps, but as of yet have no response.

[edit] In fact, both Grindr and Tinder already have safety notices.[/edit]

Why does the evidence matter? Well, because assaults are things we need to take very seriously. If commented upon by public officials, the suggestions and proposals raised need to, at least to some extent, tackle the problem. In lieu of the evidence that non-descript safety alerts would have prevented assaults, I shall have to defer to assumption — that people who are horny will take the risk and meet up in a way that could expose them to harm. Safety alerts would not make a jot of difference.

I’m sure John’s campaign comes from a good place (in fact, his suggestion that school PSHE should cover dating apps is spot-on), but superficially, it comes across as a cynical ploy to exploit a very serious issue for political purposes. The claim that dating apps are responsible for assaults is disingenuous at best, outrageous at worst. I am more than willing to meet with John and help him formulate a constructive campaign for dating app safety that will yield results — but until then, this “war on dating apps” is nothing more than Focus bluster.