Tinder, Facebook Frenemies, DM slides and your safety.
A Tinder user posted recently about her experience with having to block and report a dead match after receiving requests for money from him. What are the guidelines for Tinder, Facebook Frenemies and your safety?
She fully understood the pitfalls and obvious dangers of meeting in public or being catfished, and quickly cottoned on to the fact that the dishy Marine was not who he said he was, nor was he going to be her Firestarter.
All sounds good and safe? Block, report and move on. Not so. The same person posted the same profile not 24 hours later and did so again and again until she left the platform altogether exhausted from the process. It’s easy to be whoever you want to be online, however, social media platforms do have a responsibility to vet people who have been red flagged by other users, and not allow them back on to the platform without investigation.
Facebook is probably better than we’d like them to be at this, blocking people is easy and effective and there appear to be no loopholes, but not much fun when the shoe is on the other foot.
Facebook is decidedly prissy and easily affronted by leaping to conclusions and blocking and penalizing users for using ‘hate speech’ and ‘porn’, usually nothing more than ‘I hate having to go to Home Affairs because the queues are so long’ or reposting an image of a pre-Raphaelite muse in a state of undress in the appreciation of art.
Chanelle Van Tonder and Dimakatso Motaung, our online expert attorneys, list below the safest social media channels to use, and why.
Signal
Aside from the expected end-to-end encryption, users now have the option to retire or expire parts of conversations in a sci-fi act of self-destruction
Telegram
Telegrams transparency allowing the user to download outside of the Google and Apple App Stores indicates their focus on user safety.
Snapchat
This seems surprising, however, not only are all images fully encrypted, the ultimate goal of Snapchat is for users to destroy images and delete any history of them unlike those unfortunate memories that haunt us from Facebook.
While Facebook owns the platform and continues to collect metadata from users, WhatsApp is safer than Facebook’s own messaging service.
Pinterest is the second most popular platform for sharing inspiration images after Instagram. They are clearly and open about which data they’re planning to collect, and what they’ll be doing with it.
Like Microsoft, Linkedin is cheerfully mining away at your data, but their focus remains on the user’s safety as it is a professional platform which should be used carefully and with a tight rein on you who your contacts are.
Always, ALWAYS read the Terms of Service | Privacy Policy. These change in a heartbeat.
For those of you who are wondering what happened to the lady on Tinder, try to find her on one of these, ranked in order of safety.
The League for celebrity spotting, good luck getting in, you’ll need an invitation from J-Lo
Bumble for female empowerment, ladies first and their protecting of delicate sensibilities by having a built in Private Detector that blurs the oft spotted anatomical elements from an image
Scruff for its praise from the LGBTQ+ community for protecting their location from being triangulated with a distance-cloaking security option
Tinder to whom we have to give credit for introducing a Safety Centre and the option to upload the time and location of your date in case you need to press the panic button. They do need to work on picking up the catfish so in the meantime, check these tips they’re offering up https://swipelife.tinder.com/post/signs-of-a-catfish