The Person Behind the Pixels: The Ethics of How Online Data Commodifies People
(disclaimer: throughout this article I will be focusing on heterosexual relationships. The roles and marketplace I am describing can have drastic differences in non-heterosexual contexts)
Dating apps have been marketed as an easy method to meeting large amounts of suitors and be a bridge to new romantic relationships. But after further scientific inquiry, reports of loneliness, disillusionment, and harassment have been attached to online dating. This is predominantly to the inability of these apps to create a design that breaks down the enormous dating pool, stray away from physical attractiveness as a deciding factor, and account for unequal gender experiences in the dating environment.
The current designs of dating apps create an unethical dating market that objectifies individuals based on physical appearance, exacerbates harmful gender differences, and creates overall dissatisfaction.
Picture this. You’re 25 and you just moved to a new city. You’ve solidified your friends, but somethings missing. You broke up with your college boyfriend last year and you’re finally looking to get back out there and play the field. You’re excited, you haven’t dated around since you were 21. You remember your nights out with the girls, flirting with any and everyone at the bars of your small collegetown. However, after day follows day follows day of swiping, all you feel is lonely and let down. How am I supposed to get to know anyone online? Why are all my messages pinging with “damn girl you got a body”, “Trynna link(;”, or no message at all. This is not the upbeat conversational dating world you experienced in college. You feel trapped in a world of endless swiping with no real progression of your non-digital dating life. Is this your fault? No, dating apps are designed in a way that commodifies the dating process, thus forging these feelings of detachment and loneliness.
How can the design of apps affect how YOU think, YOUR relationships, and cause YOUR addiction to the swiping and scrolling.? Let’s dig in.
The current design of dating apps creates a a highly visible dating “market”. Given this is america, markets are based on commodities. And when applied to dating apps it inevitably objectifies individuals on their quest for love. This has exacerbated an already gender defined dating marketplace. It is well-known that the tech world has extreme inequities in gender, race, and sexuality presence. These inequities have been seen in hiring practices and algorithmic biases. But, these inequities go beyond the code of the applications and often spread into the user facing design. Tech companies often claim the basis of their designs depends on usability improvements. But many of these usability designs are truly addiction designs. They are focused on getting users hooked and fail to account for harmful effects on the users and creation of a dating market.
What all dating apps have in common is the ability to view dozens, if not hundreds, of dating profiles with no real attachment to the person behind the pixels. Apps make your options widely visible and accessible with a design that presents physical appearance before bios. Creating mass physical appearance judgments and a culture of defining and categorizing preferences without tangible personality connections.
The real transformation of the dating market lies in the ability for these apps to present nearly the entire market to the user. Say your name is Samantha. Samantha downloaded Tinder and she lives in New York City. If Samantha does not set an age preference and chooses a 20 mile radius for matching, she now has access to thousands upon thousands of profiles to swipe through. She is not equipped to process this many people, nor does she time to learn and assess if they would be a potential match for her. Partly due to the inability to truly know someone online, but even more to the consequence of her brains automatic categorization of profiles once she starts swiping more and more.
Before the rise of online dating, your dating pool was constricted to extensions of social circles or location. Not only did this constrict your numbers, but often constricted judgment to face to face attraction and assessment of romantic chemistry. Now, dating is extended far beyond circles and other determinants have to be used to breakdown options. The combination of our brains categorization of people and the presentation of physical appearance right off the bat has created the harmful term, “relationshopping”.
“Relationshopping”. A term that so adequately defines our brains default to capitalistic instincts of picking and placing value based off “demand”. We define our preferences in relation to how we see ourselves in the market of dating and how we see those presented to us as a “commodity” in high demand with high value based off of a picture and a couple of words. Continuing this practice is harmful because dating chemistry is often unpredictable. The application of market principles to process the masses of potential partners skews our perception of real romantic relationships.
The shift of dating into a marketplace, facilitated by the proliferation of online dating, introduces many wrong notions associated with dating.
Even more concerning, the continual underrepresentation of minorities in the tech world has created unequal say in the shaping of many apps and can produce social inequities and exclusion. Whitney Wolfe Herd was one of the first pioneers in the online dating industry to sound the alarm on these inequities. Herd was former vice president of marketing at Tinder and left to form Bumble, her female-oriented dating app. But, how different was Bumble? And why didn’t it solve the ongoing issue commodification in the online dating world…
One of the biggest short comings of Bumble was theorizing rather than experimenting. You would think that an app that claims to be female focused would have tangible evidence of their feminist claims. However, there have been no studies that the design of female messaging before the mail, and their algorithm that claims to eliminate harassment, truly works. Much of Bumble’s perceived female-oriented design is merely in their marketing towards females instead of experimental design that produces tangible equality differences from other apps.
Looking back on the female role in dating, the ability for online dating, as we know it, to thrive was paved by the sexual revolution of the 1970s. This revolution liberated women to be awarded the same dating and sexual privelages as men without the same previous stigma seen in traditional courtship. That’s where Bumble got it right. They demonstrated the liberating power of women to court men first rather than the traditional meek role of male pursuance. But this supposed equal footing and female sexual revolution has not been all smooth sailing for women. A consequence of these eqal sexual expression abilities on dating apps has been the emergence of “hook up” culture. Whether “hook up” culture is truly harmful or liberating is contested topic on the position it puts women in. In my opinion, it allows women to be sexually free in a way that was too taboo in the 20th century, but it can commodify and depersonalize relationships that is harmful for women. This commodification has been exacerbated by the design of the online dating market applications.
In addition to the commodification of individuals and gender biases, marketplace principles are often applied to one’s perception of their romantic luck. A marketplace in America is seen as unbiased and all-knowing. However, this can not be applied to human-to-human relationships. Further, dating marketplaces are fundamentally flawed due to the continuous entry and exit as individuals get in and out of relationships. Thus, when someone feels like they are not receiving their fair share of suitors or relationships, bitterness and loneliness can follow. What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with THEM for not choosing me?
The “them” mentality has been especially harmful to women. There are a plethora of reports of men targeting women as the reasons for their disillusionment. If a man sees himself as desirable and in “high demand”, yet applies capitalistic principles of an impartial market, he will see the women as acting unfairly to him if he is not chosen. This is not an entirely male phenomenon, but the skew of sexual harassment towards women online and offline is undeniable. The creation of narratives by these apps as a place that makes dating easier and more accessible can further exacerbate these feelings when individuals feel they are not getting their desired outcomes from these apps. Although I do believe that the big tech companies that are responsible for these apps did not intend for these negative outcomes, their focus on designs that disregard ethical concern and focus on swiping addiction is incredibly harmful.
I urge all my readers to read Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock. She does a great job of emphasizing the ethical concerns in the absence of design justice. There are incredible inequities in who is designing the apps that flood our screens. Yes, men do understand the dating market because they are a part of it. But can they truly understand the dating market from a woman’s perspective? A person of color? A member of the LGBTQ+?
Since men, especially white heterosexual men, are in a dominant group they are at risk for perpetuating the same social inequities seen in society and embedding them deep into their applications. This comes up in design, algorithms, and markting. That is one of the pressing reason Whitney Wolfe Herd left Tinder to develop Bumble. Yet, we still aren’t doing enough. We need tangible design changes that produce even more tangible equity bridges for all people. This kind of Design Justice that Costanza-Chock advocates for requires a reconfiguration of the design process. It requires end users throughout the process to give real time feedback on the inequities and objectification threat of the designs. It is equally important that the design process is led by minorities that bear the blunt of harassment and objectification in the dating world. Although Bumble succeeded better than past dating apps in their representation of women in the development process, they have lacked true design justice when it comes to the principle of “building with,not for” women.
There are many areas that dating apps can improve their research and design to address the concerns I’ve been outlining. On top of design inequities, it is critical that we don’t overlook to influence of algorithms. If high powered search engines like Google and multi-billion dollar media platforms like facebook have been criticized about their algorithmic biases, it is important to study their role in online dating. This can be difficult though. Dating apps are not as public as these platforms. The user only views their matches and their presented profiles for swiping. Thus, in depth scientific studies would have to be conducted to truly understand any underlying biases in these algorithms. Over 30 million people use dating apps in the US and algorithms, in general, have been proven to greatly influence choices by pointing users toward specific options. Yet, there is very little research on the influence algorithms have on each person’s experience in the online dating world. This is to the fault of the companies and research in general. Understanding of the algorithm, merged with adjustment in design, has the potential to resolve many of the numerous concerns dating apps have exacerbated.
No human deserves to be commodified. But all humans do deserve real love and connection. It is important that going forward dating apps take the same ethical conerns into account that the media has been pushing for social media and search engines. As the digital world is slowly taking over our realities, it is important to create equality. Do better dating apps because I know you can.
references:
Anderson, M., Vogels, E. A., & Turner, E. (2020, October 2). The virtues and downsides of online dating. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/02/06/the-virtues-and-downsides-of-online-dating/
Ashley Fetters, K. T. (2020, August 19). The ‘dating market’ is getting worse. The Atlantic. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/02/modern-dating-odds-economy-apps-tinder-math/606982/
Bloomberg. (n.d.). For Bumble, the Future Isn’t Female, It’s Female Marketing. Bloomberg.com. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-01-17/for-bumble-the-future-isn-t-female-it-s-female-marketing
Costanza-Chock, S. (n.d.). Design justice. Social Justice Network.
Guadagno, R. E., Okdie, B. M., & Kruse, S. A. (2011, December 6). Dating deception: Gender, online dating, and exaggerated self-presentation. Computers in Human Behavior. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563211002548
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Stephanie Tom Tong, Jeffrey T. Hancock, Richard B. Slatcher, author, S. T. T. E., Jeffrey T. Hancock2, & Richard B. Slatcher3. (2016, July 17). The influence of technology on romantic relationships: Understanding online dating. SpringerLink. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-39910-2_16
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