Tinder Launches Mandatory Facial Verification to Weed Out Bots and Scammers

On Wednesday, Tinder announced that it is rolling out a mandatory facial verification tool for new users in the US to help combat the spread of fake profiles and weed out “bad actors.”

Tinder claims its mandatory facial integration feature, called Face Check, is a first for a major dating app. During the sign-up process, new members complete a “liveness check” by taking a short video selfie within the app. The procedure collects and stores an encrypted map of information about the shape of the user’s face. “We don’t store a picture of your face, it’s not photo recognition, it’s data points about the shape of your face that are turned into a mathematical hash,” says Yoel Roth, head of Trust and Safety for Match Group, which owns Tinder. Tinder then uses that “hash” to check whether a new sign-up matches an account that already exists on Tinder.

Face Check is currently available to users in California, which will be followed by Texas and other states.

In a news release, Roth said the measure “sets a new benchmark for trust and safety across the dating industry” and “it helps tackle one of the hardest problems online, knowing whether someone is real … while adding meaningful obstacles that are difficult for bad actors to circumvent.”

The company defines “bad actors” as accounts that engage in deceptive behavior, including spamming, scamming, and bots. Currently 98 percent of the content moderation actions on Tinder address fake accounts, scamming, and spam. “There is a significant volume of the overall trust and safety work we do on Tinder that is focused on this challenge.”

Roth says it is a “meaningful improvement in our ability to address scaled abuse. You can get new phone numbers, new email addresses, new devices—you can’t really get a new face.”

The company is aware that asking new members to scan their faces might be seen as a privacy issue, but “theoretically, if somebody were to get access to every single one of these hashes that’s been created, there isn’t really anything they could do.”

The app’s previous verification methods were voluntary. Members, depending on their jurisdiction, could opt to verify their profiles through a selfie or ID process. Other dating apps like Bumble also use facial recognition software to let daters verify their authenticity, but on a voluntary basis.

When asked what the app plans to do about the fake profiles that already exist, given Face Check applies only to new users, Roth says the tech is most effective in curbing “the biggest issue that we’re concerned with, which is the bulk creation of new accounts.”