How Our Married Tech Editor Was Rejected By a Dating App
His ‘mistake’: his Facebook profile showed his marital status.
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Should married people date at all?
While an individual’s dismissal of an extramarital relationship may be termed prudish, an app’s refusal is being hailed as a case of ‘great filtering’. So, what happened? Our resident tech editor was filtered out from a dating app after it crawled his Facebook profile, that had his marital status on record.
Apparently, the app Truly Madly – that claims to find your soulmate – does not let you subscribe to its services if you are already found to be married or committed. You see – there can be but one soulmate!
The app was quick to point out the ‘no-married-people-allowed’ policy to our tech editor when he tried to review the app.
So, how was our tech editor ‘caught’?
Through his digital footprint, which in this case was his FB profile that showed his marital status. The app takes information from users’ photo ID (eg. passport), phone number, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and gives them a Trust Score. Facebook and the photo ID make up for 60% of the score. A user must have a minimum score of 30% to get his account validated.
So while it is difficult to keep monogamy in check every day, it does help to have regular digital stops.
Where Vows Fail, Can Algorithms Work?
The larger question here, really, is: When vows cannot hold a married person back from cheating, how can an app?
This, even as the Ashley Madison website leak shows how cheating is far more prevalent in India than it is imagined to be.
Too Many Adulterers In India
According to Ashley Madison’s leaked user data, New Delhi itself has about 38,652 adulterous users of the website. Mumbai has some 33,036 users, followed by Chennai (16,434) and Kolkata (11,807).
While the number of Indians involved in the Ashley Madison website leak isn’t large, it is indicative of the fact that extra-marital affairs – once a notorious aberration – are rapidly becoming commonplace in India. Some more digital brakes, perhaps?
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)