The Future Of Online Dating Is Unsexy And Brutally Effective
Posted on October 26, 2017
GIZMODO – Oct 25 – When users give the dating app LoveFlutter their Twitter handle, it rewards them with a 28-axis breakdown of their personality. The app works with the language processing company Receptiviti.ai to compute the compatibility between users based on Twitter feeds. It's true that we reveal more of ourselves in Twitter posts, Facebook likes, Instagram photos, and Foursquare check-ins than we realize. Researchers already think they can predict how neurotic we are from our Foursquare check-ins. Algorithms could also use our online behavior to learn the real answers to questions we might lie about in a dating questionnaire. Just as dating algorithms will get better at learning who we are, they'll also get better at learning who we like – without ever asking our preferences. Already, some apps do this by learning patterns in who we left and right swipe on, the same way Netflix makes recommendations from the movies we've liked in the past. Today, dating apps don't (openly) mine our digital data as nearly much as they could. Maybe they think we'd find it too creepy, or maybe we wouldn't like what they learned about it. But if data mining were the key to the end of the bad date, wouldn't it be worth it?
