The Volokh Conspiracy
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"Tinder Backgrounds" to Appear in Georgia Law Review
Why Dating Apps Should Have ID Verification and Mandatory Background Checks
Dating apps continue to make headlines for how little protection they provide against repeat violent offenders and arguably enable them. I have a law review article entitled "Tinder Backgrounds" that is forthcoming in the Georgia Law Review (and whose draft is available here) trying to address this issue. Here is the abstract:
In an era in which dating apps have become the primary matchmaker for millions of Americans, the lack of basic safety requirements for these platforms is both striking and dangerous. This Article explores how the rise of dating apps has created unprecedented opportunities for predators to exploit victims through deception and violence, while leaving those victims with virtually no legal recourse. Although dating apps have become critical infrastructure for modern relationship formation, their operators face minimal legal obligations to verify user identities or screen for unsafe individuals. Users have attempted to fill this regulatory void through self-help measures like crowdsourced warning groups on social media, but these informal solutions expose participants to defamation liability while failing to provide systematic protection.
As the Supreme Court considers ID verification requirements for adult websites in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, this Article argues that similar measures—combined with mandatory background checks—are actually of greater importance in the dating app context where physical safety is at stake. While dating apps match users who would otherwise never meet, this convenience brings heightened risks when perpetrators can easily misrepresent their identities and histories. This Article proposes a federal framework requiring dating apps to verify and store user identities through government-issued IDs and conduct criminal background checks. This approach would help to prevent sexual, financial, and other predation while preserving the core benefits that make online dating valuable. The Article demonstrates why traditional objections to regulating intimacy and dating markets hold less force in an era of industrialized matchmaking, and how existing precedents support reasonable verification requirements that protect user safety as technology-assisted deception (including via artificial intelligence) continues to evolve. Through carefully calibrated regulation focused on prevention rather than after-the-fact remedies, the law can better protect the many individuals who rely on dating apps to find connection.
