TL;DR:
If you are a trans, non-binary, or otherwise at-risk user you deserve to be safe online. Delete your OkCupid account, and
then ask Match Group to fully erase your account data. Scroll down to the bottom to see how to do this.
If you want to stay on the site, create a new account with a new email address and phone number, and be very careful how you fill it in.
OkCupid has always been a safe-space for 2SLGBTQIA+ users – At the moment, in my opinion it risks becoming a disaster waiting to happen.
i have posted this on this weblog deliberately so that it is available to share between people, but won’t be generally read. I have about 5 people a year reading this blog. I have sent a copy to Match Group to give them a chance to do something properly rather than me have to post something more widely. It is much better them quietly fixing the issue than drawing attention to the issue to the wrong people. If you are here, and this note is still here, please don’t share this to anything that will get too much attention.
History:
OkCupid had a long and proud history of being a safe and welcoming space for LGBTQ+ users. In a world where some dating sites still only allow male and female genders, and don’t acknowledge the existence of bi or queer people (I am looking at you, POF!) OkCupid stood out, even amongst the other Match Group owned sites.
Since OkCupid grew from SparkMatch in 2000, it always allowed straight/gay/bi folks, in 2016 it (poorly) implemented features for non-monogamous users, and in 2014 it expanded both genders and sexual identity, and in 2018 it started to allow people to make pronouns visible and expanded ACE options.
Not only that, the Moderation and Customer teams were mostly made up of people who had been users of the site, and I think I can fairly say that it was the most diverse Trust & Safety team in the industry.
Changes:
That’s the (very abridged) history. Since then there have been a lot of changes.
As many people on Reddit noticed, the platform has changed. This happened after I left, so I am going on what people who left the company after me have told me. The code and databases have been rewritten and moved to a central system that Match uses to run many generic dating sites. Many features were removed, I suspect this is because the people doing the migration didn’t understand why people would use them. As an example: the ability to explain your answers to questions with a few lines of text was very useful for the very binary structure of OkCupid’s questions to add personal nuance – Many people counted this as OkCupid’s best feature and it was removed without consultation or any announcement. People spent tens, if not hundreds of hours working on some of those question answers; that is not a good way to treat loyal users.
The matching algorithm has also changed beyond recognition to inflate match percentages and keep more people in the swipe pool. It has long been known that women tend to prefer men in the 90 percent match range. You can see the roots of this pattern in Christian Rudder’s Dataclysm, which unpacks OkCupid’s early data and user tendencies. As the swipe model took hold, high matches were quickly exhausted, forcing the algorithm to adapt.
Have a look at Christian Rudder’s TED-Ed talk: “Inside OkCupid: The Math of Online Dating” from 2013 on YouTube. It’s simple to reverse engineer the match algorithm. Compare your calculations with the matches you’re getting. OkCupid’s “Unique Selling Point” was the matching algorithm; people had trusted it for years, but if you are to trust Redditors (and sometimes they are right!) the whole system has been broken beyond belief to the detriment of the users, and users notice this happening.
** Since I wrote this, OkCupid has removed a key layer of the matching system, removing the whole “What I want in my partner” part, thus rendering the algorithm essentially useless. Again see Christian’s TED talk for why.
Safety:
I was Head of Safety for OkCupid for many years, I first worked for OkCupid in 2007 and then went back in 2012 to fix the moderation team. I eventually got the title “Head of User Safety and Advocacy” and started to build Match Group’s first Incident Response Team and (I hate the term) Centre of Excellence for Safety. We were well ahead of the industry on this. We needed to be.
Dating sites can be very dangerous places. Unlike any other social media site model, a dating site’s aim is to take two vulnerable users who may be online dating for the very first time, and encourage them to meet up in real life. This is the start of most true-crime shows, and from my point of view, that was most of my job. My teams pushed for a lot of changes, some were taken up, some weren’t; but one thing we could generally rely on was the US government being generally friendly towards what we did. Match Group has a fantastic central legal team dealing with subpoenas, and I have dealt with thousands of legal requests with them. I have never seen a warrant misused in my many years there.
That’s changed. Trans and non-binary users, “liberals”, and anyone the government deems a threat are no longer safe online. These groups are increasingly at risk of becoming active targets of the US Government or malicious civilians and hate-groups.
In the past, it’s my strong belief that Match Group would never have responded to wide-ranging fishing-expedition warrants to seek all information on a targeted group, but if the law starts classifying these groups as criminals, then who knows what will happen. Unfortunately, we don’t have to look too far back in history to speculate.
Who are those with harmful intent?
Governments:
The US Government is the most concerning entity at the moment, but they are not the only ones. The Government at least theoretically has to act legally. There are also issues with other countries; for example, the UAE, Egypt, Russia (and these days, Hungary) – But Match Group has always been good at dealing with them, and has a lot of experience in fending off harassment attempts. It’s always been helped by the fact that their head office isn’t in the state, and country that the malicious requests are coming from. Match Group is based in Texas.
I don’t know the new CEO, Spencer Rascoff. His political donation history is promising ( https://www.opensecrets.org/search?q=Spencer+Rascoff&type=donors ) especially compared to the previous CEO’s donor-history. But even a strong Democrat can’t stand up to too much pressure from the full force of a broken government with the DOJ, the FBI and State Governors on their side.
Malicious users:
The fact that all of the genders, pronouns, sexuality choices, essays, and question answers are visible to anyone on the site means that should the data be scraped ( https://www.wired.com/2016/05/okcupid-study-reveals-perils-big-data-science/ ). It is possible for somebody who is moderately tech-savvy to search for at-risk users whilst using the site as a user, and to then dox them (make their information public or post it to doxxing forums), or add them to various lists and databases (DHS, FBI, ICE etc).
Hackers and rogue states:
These are always a worry! Although if I were one of these, I would just go the next route…
Malicious staff:
Do you trust all of your information to somebody earning less than the living wage, or somebody in another country earning a dollar an hour? If you are trusting any social media site, then you already are. The operations and moderation of sites these days is mostly outsourced, or run by teams whose budgets have been gutted. Although there are some very dedicated people in some of them, they are facing impossible targets and budgets in an industry that is incredibly underpaid and stretched to impossible stress-loads. Screening and training is becoming non-existent and when the cost of user-safety is matched by the risk and cost of prosecution, prosecution always ends up as the cheaper option.
Dating sites have a lot of information, and while it is likely that outsourced moderators may not be able to search for too much, in-house ones can, and they have used this maliciously in the past as this article from The Bureau Investigates shows ( https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2024-07-22/okcupid-put-users-at-risk-of-assault-by-ignoring-safety-concerns-say-former-staff ) – I didn’t do an interview for that one personally, but I did read it before publication and confirmed that it was factual.
Ultimately there are many people who can see all of your information, who can read your messages, and who may well not be as honest or as ethical as you’d hope, or as sympathetic to your humanity as you’d hope. And it does happen.
Detached management:
If I, or anyone in my team had still been at OkCupid, this would have been raised as a serious issue straight after the 2024 US election. We would have been drawing up an action plan of internal safety measures, new policies, and product & marketing recommendations. There should have been far more communication and visible safety features promoted, but I have seen nothing. No communications, no updates, and no product changes at all.
The fact that I am writing this, as an ex-employee, who left the company two years ago to become a whistleblower because I couldn’t change anything internally says a lot. I haven’t heard a single thing from Match Group about the safety and potential exposure of vulnerable people because of their sites, and that is not good. We should have heard much more, we should have seen new safety features launched and stronger protections built around vulnerable groups.
In this case, it isn’t that the management of the various groups is malicious, I genuinely don’t think they are. But they don’t understand the environment that their sites operate in; they don’t understand the users. They see them as money-making tools, and focus on the marketing and the cool success stories.
This isn’t how Risk and Safety works. Dating sites are not like other social media sites, they need risk professionals with years of real experience, who intimately understand the sociosphere they’re operating in.
What should you do now then?
Delete your account. Just do it, now.
You can always come back later with less public data, and use a different email address and phone number. Right now, safety is important. You definitely shouldn’t have to self-censor your dating profile, but that’s the world we live in at the moment.
As an at-risk user, be aware that your information is available to anyone who cares to create an account and look at it. Changing it at this point may not help because the database and change history may log it (since they moved platform, I don’t know for sure) – But also backups can be subpoenaed, and information slips into all sorts of places (experiments etc) – And again, internal staff have access to all sorts of information.
Match Group and OkCupid do follow some good laws, such as the European GDPR and the Californian CCPA. Both of those allow you to purge your data, and there are steep financial penalties for failing to act on a deletion request within a certain timeframe. The current Match Group terms of service say that they will preserve any data “in case of requests by law enforcement” for three months. I would say that for a user requesting full data-deletion for safety, this shouldn’t apply and it’s too vague a reason for the GDPR certainly. I don’t work there any more, but I would make it clear that you want a full data erasure, as quickly as possible.
You can contact Match’s legal department at [email protected] or write to:
Attn: Legal Department
Match Group
P.O. Box 25458
Dallas, Texas 75225