Are Dating Apps Designed to Be Deleted?

August 2023

Are dating apps designed to be deleted? Are they designed to help you find your perfect swipe- right? Or do they have another agenda that differs from how dating apps market themselves?  

Media Studies PhD candidate Meghan Voll is exploring the real value of dating apps for their creators and how they serve the underlying economic objectives of the publisher in the way they are designed.  

Voll explains that dating apps encourage you to share the most about yourself to find your most compatible match. However, these personal details you are encouraged to share become tradable data for dating apps to utilize and sell.  

“Users are encouraged to be their most authentic and honest self and upload many different photos and videos,” says Voll. 

Apps such as Hinge encourage voice recordings, videos, and quizzes so users can share more than a prompt or a photo. Other apps take it one step further and unlock your most compatible matches only once users share all the required information the app asks for. 

Users are encouraged to enter their hometown, employment, height, age, political and cultural views along with various photos and videos to attract a partner who has similar interests and lives nearby.   

For Voll, app agendas have less to do with matching up compatible users and more to do with maximizing their revenue. 

“It works well for the way they make money which is based on the extraction of user data and trading that data to advertisers, marketers, and data brokers,” says Voll, suggesting that apps capitalize on user vulnerability to gather the valuable data they need.    

Voll is focusing her research on the popular dating apps Tinder, Hinge, and the independently owned Coffee meets Bagel. 

“I am interested in the real values of dating apps, how they are conflated, and how they serve underlying economic objectives in design vs the way they market themselves.” 

Her PhD work is supervised by FIMS associate professor Joanna Redden. Voll is also a TA in an undergraduate course titled Digital Marketing Fundamentals, taught by instructor Erin Isings. 

When asked to describe her FIMS experience in one word, Voll chose “opportunity.”  

“There are always things happening in this department that has created a lot of unexpected opportunities for me in such a good way.” 

Looking ahead, Voll hopes that once she completes her PhD, she’ll be able to launch a career in an academic institution like Western and continue publishing her scholarly work.