Technology

It would be interesting to see something similar that required accusations to be backed up with evidence. Police reports, court proceedings and results, news articles etc.

It would also be a lot safer, legally speaking, for the service provider.

I think there must be a way to deliver on the value of the app without it being the privacy/public exposure nightmare it sounds like. Speaking naively, perhaps a setup where you can only speak about a person with those who have actually matched with them.

that's a great(terrible) idea for a sex trafficking psyop. just get yourself a female spokesperson and make it a platform that gives a voice to women who have survived abuse. they'll willingly give you all their information on where to find them and their psych profiles on how to manipulate them.

fucked up, but really shows how fucked up apps are in general and how much power we give to them over ourselves.

The experiences coming to mind were not illegal, but were absolutely things I want to spare my fellow humans from.

What about a guy who had a panic attack in the very beginning and couldn't stop talking about his deceased dad, then about aunts and uncles, then about the dog, then about architecture, then didn't get the hint because of all the shaking, got petrified when hinted at an alcohol element in the continuation of the meeting and in the end didn't even understand a very direct hints at "only silence can save this" and having at least a sleepover?.. Who only became kinda normal after taking a sedative next morning, still shaking.

Just describing one negative experience I have provided in the past, and that while yeah, it wasn't too cool - maybe lifelong shame is not what I deserve for that ...

(Yes, I know that girl was a hero)

The group summary gives a buffer so the person reviewed doesn’t know which specific date said what. And ensures the summary doesn’t include negative comments about a person unless multiple dates of theirs independently report similar experiences.

That can't be done without somehow verifying identities of all the people involved. Unless the review app is the same as the dating app. Then there are various technical variants, like some cryptographic connection between the reviewed person's identity, the token representing one date, and a temporary identity for the reviewer, used to sign the review message. Something like that.

But that only for the entity doing the summary, which will have to be trusted with the original reviews. And that "buffer" will remove any kind of verification, unless it's something egghead-smart like a smart contract forming the review on every client, which means every client can also see the original reviews. So I dunno.

Of course a bad actor could ditch their dating profile and start fresh any time they build up enough negative reviews to make their summary look bad. And of course the reviews and the summaries would have to be secured tighter than “Tea” is.

Honestly things like this should work like some hybrid of Briar and Freenet. Just entrusting it to a centralized service is as stupid as using Facebook. And in this specific case Briar model is kinda fine - if you synchronize with everyone using the application. You don't need to have the reviews from everyone about everyone, just about people roaming the same general area.

My hey we’re probably using Firestore as their database without authenticating their api calls to firebase functions. Basically leaving their api endpoints open to the public Internet.

They could have connected service account and used some kind of auth handshake between that and generate a temporary login token based on user credentials and the service account oauth credentials to access the api. but they probably just had everything set to unauthenticated

I think the key reason this was seen as not being terribly offensive was the fact that women are disproportionately more likely than men to be on the receiving end of tons of different negative consequences when dating, thus to a degree justifying them having more of a safe space where their comfort and safety is prioritized.

However I think a lot of people are also recognizing now that such an app has lots of downsides that come as a result of that kind of structure, like false allegations being given too much legitimacy, high amounts of sensitive data storage, negative interactions being blown out of proportion, etc. I also think that this is yet another signature case of "private market solution to systemic problem" that only kind of addresses the symptoms, but not the actual causes of these issues that are rooted more in our societal standards and expectations of the genders, upbringing, depictions in media, etc.