WA teen still waiting for justice after being trafficked via Tinder

The bare minimum

Federal and state law makes clear that minors under 18 cannot consent to engaging in commercial sex acts. State law also specifies that not knowing a victim’s age or believing a victim was older does not excuse the crime.

Protection of minors, however, becomes less clear on social media and dating apps.

While many dating apps have some form of identity verification, including video selfies and the use of artificial intelligence to flag suspicious activity, kids and traffickers continue to use these platforms with relative ease, police and prosecutors say.

“There’s a lot of predators that are on those sites all day long, every day, and their job is to just find the next person,” said Maurice Washington, a detective with the Seattle Police Department’s Human Trafficking Unit.

Match Group, the American tech company that owns Tinder and other popular online dating platforms like Hinge, Match and OkCupid, has endured criticisms from Congress and advocates in recent years for its failures to protect people from sexual predators on its apps. In February 2020, Congresswomen Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Ann Kuster of New Hampshire sent a letter to Match Group urging the company to check users against sex-offender registries and to be more transparent about its efforts to respond to reports of sexual violence on its platforms.

Amid these calls for action, Match Group announced a partnership in 2021 with a nonprofit called Garbo that would provide background checks for Tinder users. The partnership fell apart in 2023 following turnover in Match Group leadership and a rocky rollout of background-check services, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Garbo founder and CEO Kathryn Kosmides describes the partnership’s end as a “values misalignment.” She worried the technology that Match Group wanted to use would provide a false sense of security for users, she said.

“From our perspective, Match Group doesn’t have any real mission, vision, and values — which we sadly realized when we launched in 2022,” Kosmides wrote in a statement to InvestigateWest. “After launching, to add insult to injury, Tinder chose not to pay us for seventeen months. The absence of internal support combined with a bizarre focus on a piece of technology that we and dozens of other experts warned against led us to exit the partnership.”

Match Group didn’t respond to InvestigateWest’s requests for comment.

Kosmides points out that companies like Match Group have few incentives to keep bad actors off their platforms, as their business relies on users signing up.

“That just creates kind of this bad incentivization model in the industry,” she said. “It’s very much a check-the-box, ‘what is the bare minimum that I have to legally do’ in a lot of these companies. And it’s very, very unfortunate.”

Tinder now plans to expand its optional verification process for users in the U.S. later this summer, according to Match Group. People will be able to upload government-issued identification, and Tinder will check that the ID matches the user’s photos and profile information. Once verified, users will get a blue checkmark on their profiles.

But having users upload additional personal information to dating apps opens a different debate about user safety: protection versus privacy. Match Group platforms and other dating apps like Grindr and Bumble have faced several lawsuits for alleged privacy violations in recent years, including accusations of storing users’ biometric data without proper consent and sharing sensitive information to third parties — in Grindr’s case, users’ HIV status.

“I think that there are more ways that platforms could be utilizing technology and safety and security other than, ‘Hey, give up your privacy,’” Kosmides said. “That’s a slippery slope.”