Foregrounding Women's Safety in Mobile Social Matching and Dating Apps

Abstract

The design of social matching and dating apps has changed continually through the years, marked notably by a shift to mobile devices, and yet user safety has not historically been a driver of design despite mounting evidence of sexual and other harms. This paper presents a participatory design study with women-a demographic at disproportionate risk of harm through app-use-about how mobile social matching apps could be designed to foreground their safety. Findings indicate that participants want social matching apps to augment women's abilities for self-protection, reflected in three new app roles: 1) the cloaking device, through which the social matching app helps women dynamically manage visibility to geographically nearby users, 2) the informant, through which the app helps women predict risk of harm associated with a recommended social opportunity, and 3) the guardian, through which the app monitors a user's safety during face-to-face meetings and augments their response to risk.