Diana Parry

Thank you for having me.

Well, my research team and I have been studying dating apps for a number of years now.

And while we did hear a lot about the positives associated with dating apps, so the convenience of meeting people, the diversity of people that you could meet, meeting people that you wouldn't normally meet, we also were hearing about a lot of harms that people were experiencing.

And so we really wanted to understand that more and look at ways that we could mitigate some of those risks for people.

Yeah, so our research started with 48 interviews with people from across Canada that represented a very diverse representation of Canadians.

And we heard a lot of things around people getting unsolicited pictures, unsolicited videos, when they had expressed a firm, no, I'm not interested, still being pursued by people, even though they didn't want that.

So all sorts of different ways that people were being interviewed

dealing with things online that they hadn't necessarily expected or wanted.

Well, actually, I do think it's everyone.

We across the board, everybody that we talk to, regardless of age, race, gender, in our study, a group of participants, they all mentioned some degree of unwanted behavior on the app.

So I do think it's the majority of people who are on dating apps experience something that they don't like.

But we also did see a pattern around people who identified as women and

And gender diverse people were experiencing more harm and taking more actions to keep themselves safe online.

100%.

So people were doing a lot of what we call personal safety work online.

So they were putting in measures to keep themselves safe, but yet a boundary that they were putting up, invoking the safety features that were online, telling people when they were going out on dates or talking to somebody new.

making sure that they had their own safety measures in place.

And that's part of what we wanted to do with this app.

People in our interviews were telling us about how much time and effort that was taking.

And for some of them, it was enough that they were deciding to get off the apps.