Rape under wraps: how Tinder, Hinge and corporate owner chose profits not safety

These apps are not the police --at the same time they owe their users a responsibility to not expose them to sexual predators, deviants, extortionists, etc.

At the same time, they have to prevent maliciousness/revenge by people who don't handle rejection well.

Unfortunately, a robust system for reporting and assessment is costly, so you should err on the side of caution rather than expose your users to known depraved sexual perverts.

One thing they might do is share a database with other apps (ok, many are under the same parent co) and flag suspicious actors (I'm sure they have plenty of signal to work with to determine who is trying to get around the bans)

> Internal company documents from 2019 and 2020 show thousands of reports of “serious physical assault”

> By this point, Matthews had already been reported for rape at least once to Hinge. Court documents show that he had already allegedly sexually assaulted nine women and drugged 10. Not only did the apps allow him back on, they featured Matthews’s profile.

> Match Group didn’t make it easy for the Denver prosecutors to convict Matthews. A search warrant was issued for Hinge in July 2023. Two months later, prosecutors were still empty-handed – with the judge in the case asking at a hearing whether he needed to start “dragging people in to get stuff done”. It wasn’t until February 2024 that the Denver district attorney’s office said they had finally received documents returned by Match Group.

Disgusting. I didn't see any reference to "Duty of Care" in the article, but I hope this case is used to establish precedent of holding tech companies accountable for the same "Duty of Care" standards you'd expect from a brick/mortar business.