Chapter 1: How safe is your dating app?
neutral zone, where every perspective gets diplomatic immunity. This is The Last Show with David Cooper. How safe is your dating app? Swiping for love doesn't come with a risk management manual, but a new research project seeks to help you map the safety landscape of online dating. Since figuring out what app is safest for you is not always the easiest task.
So let's dive in and discuss all this with health professor at the University of Waterloo, Diana Perry.
Chapter 2: What patterns of safety issues did users report on dating apps?
Diana, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me.
When most people think of dating apps, they think of the fun stuff like awkward bios, questionable selfies, not really risk management. What started making you look at these apps through that lens, the safety lens?
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.
Chapter 3: What common unwanted behaviors do users experience on dating apps?
And so we really wanted to understand that more and look at ways that we could mitigate some of those risks for people.
So you talk to users of many different dating apps. You hear their stories. What kind of experiences kept coming up again and again that makes you think, okay, there's a bit of a pattern here when it comes to safety?
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.
Chapter 4: Why do people feel overwhelmed by safety work on dating apps?
So all sorts of different ways that people were being interviewed dealing with things online that they hadn't necessarily expected or wanted.
It's kind of an ugly thing that people just expect harassment or boundary violations on these apps. Is that kind of a norm? Maybe not with everyone, but something that goes on and most people experience?
Well, actually, I do think it's everyone.
Chapter 5: What is the purpose of the new safety map for dating apps?
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.
I know it shouldn't be this way, but is the assumption on most users that they have to do the labor of staying safe on these apps? They got to do the research.
Chapter 6: How do different dating apps compare in terms of safety features?
They got to turn on the security features. They got to be proactive and block people. Is that the basic way that people are looking at this, that they got to do that work?
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.
Chapter 7: What recommendations can improve the dating app experience for users?
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.
So what we wanted to do with this safety map is put some of this work, take it off the hands of users and do it for them and put it in an interactive dynamic forum so that they could go online and figure out some of those safety features without so much personal work to them.
I was poking around with it during the commercial break. You analyzed these safety features across many different dating apps, some 30-odd, I believe. Were there surprises when you compared them? For example, did certain apps feel safer than others or look much safer than others on paper?
Yeah, well, what was surprising were some apps were quite transparent about some of the safety features and community guidelines and policies that they put in place, whereas other apps were much less transparent about what they do, if anything. So we were just happy to compile that information. And you're right, we did so across 30 different apps, those that were most popular in Canada.
We added in some diversity for different ages. races, ethnicities, sexual identity, so that we had some diversity of apps within our group. But over the 30, we found some are more transparent about the safety features that they put in place versus others.
What were some of the other things that came up in these users that you interviewed? Did swipe fatigue come up? That's something we talk about a lot on this show, just getting completely overwhelmed and not bored, but just totally stressed out and overwhelmed by these apps and how much, like, I don't know, there is to do on them and people to swipe through.
Yeah, for sure. Sweep fatigue came up quite a bit, but the fatigue was inextricably linked to this safety work that people were doing. So people who identified as women and gender diverse were much, much, much more likely to say, I'm getting really tired of the effort I have to put in to keep myself safe, the amount of profiles that I have to go through.
The work I put in terms of setting up boundaries and trying to decide if I'm going to actually meet somebody in person and feeling frustrated with the quality of interactions that they were having online.
So how can I have a better experience on a dating app quite generally? Or if I'm one of these groups you mentioned, like what are some recommendations that you have? You've got the safety map. Just pick the one that works best for you. Or are there things or features that exist that people don't know about or aren't using?
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