On Wednesday, Tinder announced that it is rolling out a mandatory facial verification tool for new users in the US to help combat the spread of fake profiles and weed out “bad actors.”
Tinder claims its mandatory facial integration feature, called Face Check, is a first for a major dating app. During the sign-up process, new members complete a “liveness check” by taking a short video selfie within the app. The procedure collects and stores an encrypted map of information about the shape of the user’s face. “We don’t store a picture of your face, it’s not photo recognition , it’s data points about the shape of your face that are turned into a mathematical hash,” says Yoel Roth, head of Trust and Safety for Match Group, which owns Tinder. Tinder then uses that “hash” to check whether