Swipe Right, but Safer

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1:07How 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 safe is 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. 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. So we really wanted to understand that more and look at ways that we could mitigate some

2:11of 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, it's still being pursued by people, even though they didn't want that. So all sorts of different ways that people were being 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 in most people experience? Well, actually, I do think it's everyone. We across the board, everybody that we talk to, regardless of age, race, gender in our

3:16study 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 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, 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 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

4:16in place. And that's part of what we wanted to do with this app. People were 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 analyze these safety features across many different dating apps, some 30 odd, I believe, where there's surprises when you can pair 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.

5:17And 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 identities, 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. Over some of the other things that came up in these users that you interviewed, did Swipe Fatigue come up? That's something we talked 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. For sure, Swipe Fatigue came up quite a bit, but the fatigue was inextricably linked to the 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

6:19and 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? Well, one of the things that we wanted to do with the safety map was put a blurb around at the top of each app that we review. We have a little blurb that gives you an overview of what that app specializes in. So one of the ways that we can encourage people to make best use of their time on the app is to pick the one that's going to do what they want it to do. So if you're looking for a more casual encounter, you can look on the safety map and look for an app that is going to facilitate those more casual type of connections. If you're looking to date more seriously, you're looking for a relationship, you can find an app that is geared towards that. For example, if you're in a particular age group, so if you want it to find the silver

7:25singles, for example, that's for people over a certain age, so that you're not wasting your time on an app that isn't really going to be a good fit for you. And so that might help address some of the fatigue that people experience. What I love about this map is it shifts safety from being something that an individual feels like they have to carry to kind of something collective. Don't you wish this is something that these app developers had, like some safety label or some consistent thing that could help users? It just, it feels very ad hoc right now, the app landscape. Oh, 100% and that was part of what came up in our interviews is that people felt an experience and we're doing the work themselves. And what we wanted to do is say, hey, some of that work should be removed from individual users and should be taken more seriously both by society and by the dating app companies. So we did that work for them in terms of putting that comparative tool in the hands of users. It's free. It's accessible. It's up to date. And now they can have some of that work done for them.

8:25I don't know how well our show tests in the demographic of app creators, dating app creators. But if there is one listening, like if you could design a dating app from scratch with safety at the center without losing the core audience or changing what the app is about, what would some things you would recommend to app authors be? Well, I would love for that person to reach out because what we would love to do is take this map and turn it into an app. So it could be the foundation of an app that would foreground safety. So I think some of the things that need to keep in mind are the ways that people communicate ensuring that pictures are not shared or video or not shared if people don't want them. We really want to foreground people who are going to create profiles that people can read and take seriously. So moving off of just picture-based swiping into more content-based swiping, be very clear about the safety features that they have and enforcing them and taking it seriously and taking action if there are breaches of those safety features.

9:29So there's lots of different things that the app companies could do to ensure people actually want to be on the app and getting the outcome that they're looking for. Diana Perry is a health professor at the University of Waterloo. Diana, where can people find this safety map for online dating on the internet? They can go to coderco.der-research.com. That's our website where we host the safety map and at the top of that website, they'll see a link to the safety map and they can click on it and get right on that. Diana, I appreciate your time. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you so much for having me. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or manning the snack table, athletic brewing fits right in. With a full lineup of non-alcoholic beer styles, you can enjoy bold flavors all game-long.

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