Tinder’s New Feature Outs Its Users

Social media is awesome…except when it’s not, as Tinder users discovered by mistake. The purpose of social media is to help you connect with other people; depending on the platform, those may be people you know in real life, or people you have yet to know but would like to. Unfortunately, a new feature on the dating platform Tinder has dragged people kicking and screaming into connecting. It’s worse than parents who decide to throw you a surprise party and invite your entire school class–filled with kids you absolutely loathe and really don’t want at your house.

Tinder Social is intentionally designed to go less the way of the “find a potential date” and more of the friendship route. Its default setting, though, highlighted for users all of their Facebook friends who are on Tinder. That could be really awkward if your married pastor or married boss suddenly appears in your Tinder connections, since it indicates he has an account…and so do you.

It gets better. Tinder Social not only displays your Facebook friends for you, it shows you their dating profiles and their preferences. It wasn’t awkward enough to find out that your married boss is on Tinder, now you know what he’s into. <shudder>

It’s not unheard of to find out that there are people within your circle of friends that are looking for romance, and on the surface, what better way to forge an actual lasting relationship than to be connected by a love-mediator to someone you actually might know? But Tinder’s real problem is in the way this was rolled out. As Microsoft learned the hard way last year, tech users don’t like waking up to surprises (like Windows 10 installed on their computers); instead, they much prefer opting into a new offer instead of clawing their way out of it before anyone finds out they were ever there. This will hopefully serve as a wakeup call to the entire tech industry: innovation is awesome, unless it costs us our jobs or our relationships…or our operating systems.