by Dr. Vincent Jones II
Dr. Vincent Jones II is an Assistant Professor of Community Health at York College, The City University of New York. His research examines technology-facilitated, gender-based violence and safety on dating apps, with particular focus on women and sexual and gender minorities.
With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, dating apps deliver Cupid’s arrows straight to our phones. But before you swipe, consider these reflections from users who’ve learned the hard way: finding connections in the digital world requires more than hope – it requires Swipe Safety. Naiveté can leave people – especially women, people of color and sexual and gender minorities — vulnerable to a multitude of harms. Some are a reflection of the offline world and others are unique to dating apps.
Even with 78% of respondents to a Forbes Health poll reporting dating app burnout, usage remains steady with the global base of users projected to grow from 350 million to 450 million by 2028 according toBusiness of Apps. Per a 2025SSRS poll, nearly two-thirds of adults aged 18-29 have used online dating platforms and about half of adults aged 30-49.
Dating apps accounted for over a quarter of U.S. marriages in 2025, according to The Knot. Also, studies from Pew Research Center indicate that LGBTQ-identified people were more likely to connect online.
For my research, I have interviewed dozens of people and conducted several focus groups aimed at understanding 1) how people learn to navigate safety, discrimination and relationship-building on dating apps when they receive no formal education about it, and 2) what the consequences are of this knowledge gap across different identities and life stages. I hope to advocate for health education interventions as well as policies that make the apps safer and more inclusive altogether. Given the sensitive nature of the conversations and to protect participants’ safety and privacy, I omit names.
Swipe Safety
When I asked one 35-year-old Black woman from Queens, New York, how she protects herself before meeting someone from an app, her answer was detailed: “phone call, video chatting. And more than once. I wanna see you in your natural habitat. If a person is scared to do that, that’s a red flag.” But when I asked if she had ever received formal education about staying safe on dating apps, her answer was immediate: “Specifically, cyber safety, no.”
Photo credit: Flure Bunny on Unsplash
This is Swipe Safety: the knowledge and skills needed to navigate dating platforms safely. Most people learn it not from parents, teachers, or health professionals, but through informal networks. This includes friends’ horror stories, trial and error, and hard-won experience.
A 30-year-old Black woman from Oakland, California, explained why she uses pseudonyms after a graduate school dating app match found her on the university intranet and showed up uninvited at a campus mixer. “Especially in a space like New York City, a concrete jungle, you have to be careful. Everything is searchable on the internet, yourself included,” she said.
These aren’t paranoid overreactions. They’re Swipe Safety: sophisticated risk assessments often developed without institutional guidance.
Dating App Dangers
Financial Scams and Predators
Romance scams have evolved into a global criminal industry. As the FBI warns, the criminals who carry out romance scams are experts at what they do, spending hours honing their skills and sometimes keeping journals on their victims. Many scammers are themselves trafficking victims forced to work in Southeast Asian “fraud dens” (BBC). High-profile cases like Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler have exposed individual predators, while Reesa Teesa’s viral 50-part TikTok series Who TF Did I Marry? became a cultural phenomenon after the Black Atlanta woman documented how she met a pathological liar on Facebook Dating and Hinge. The Aurora Phelps case, where a Las Vegas woman used dating apps to lure, drug and rob older men, three of whom died, shows the danger can be fatal. The U.S. House passed the Romance Scam Prevention Act in June 2025, but education remains the best defense.
LGBTQ+ Concerns on Dating Apps
LGBTQ+ users face compounded threats. The Federal Trade Commission has warned of sextortion scams on apps like Grindr where scammers threaten to out users by exposing the sexual identities of those who do not pay up. Physical violence is equally alarming. A Los Angeles man was charged in 2025 with murdering two men lured on Grindr, while cases in Florida and Georgia involved armed robberies and hate-motivated assaults. In Idaho, a man received 30 years in prison in 2024 for intentionally attempting to spread HIV to dozens of victims he met online. These crimes are likely underreported due to stigma.
The Generational Knowledge Gap
Users are navigating uncharted territory. Parents of teenagers didn’t have the digital dating platforms we do until recently, limiting their ability to advise children about catfishing or vetting matches. Meanwhile, Generation X adults, now in their mid-40s to late 50s, are entering the dating market after divorce or loss, often for the first time in decades.
They must reconcile vintage values with virtual venues, navigating apps originally designed for younger users. Their position in the life course, coupled with discrimination affecting women, people of color and sexual minorities, creates vulnerabilities that formal education hasn’t addressed.
School curricula haven’t filled this gap. Dating app safety, when addressed at all, gets folded into generic cybersafety modules. But dating apps present unique risks.
Users are intentionally meeting strangers for romantic and/or sexual connection. This means users are sharing their location with people they don’t know and sometimes meeting new people alone. Our educational approach hasn’t prepared users for these unique circumstances.
The Swipe Safety Knowledge Users Share
Swipe Safety includes practical strategies users have refined through experience: screenshotting a date’s profile and sending it to someone, sharing one’s location, meeting in public initially, video chatting before meeting, establishing emergency code phrases and watching for red flags. Some of these may include people who only text at certain hours, refuse to show their face, cancel meetups repeatedly or disingenuously profess love too soon.
Swipe Safety also means navigating discrimination and fetishization that platforms can’t prevent and calls for users to develop self-awareness, especially as it relates to internalized racism, homophobia, fatphobia and other harmful dispositions.
One 46-year-old Asian gay man in Quincy, Massachusetts, said: “I might swipe right on stereotypically attractive white men maybe 70% of the time, while for someone Asian or Latino or Black, I might swipe right 20% of the time.”
He reveals how “the dominating culture” shapes desire even among those it excludes. That is, society teaches people to view certain groups as more attractive, even though it hurts him and others, he ends up choosing mostly white men because those ideas have shaped what he has learned to desire.
This isn’t just individual bias. The apps themselves may be amplifying it. Research from Harvard sociologist Apryl Williams found that dating apps “automate sexual racism” through algorithms that match users with people who look like them, reinforcing racial hierarchies that rank Black women and Asian men as least desirable.
A noteworthy 2024 experiment showed Black women receiving dramatically better matches on Hinge after changing their listed race to white. Cornell researchers warn that filtering features allow users to exclude entire racial groups, erasing the serendipity that could disrupt social divisions. For users of color, the dangers of dating apps extend beyond bad actors to the platforms’ very design.
Even BLK, an app designed for Black users, is flooded with white users who disregard the app’s purpose, opening the doors for fetishization where people are objectified for their physical or cultural features with a disregard of who they truly are.
One Washington, D.C. gay, Black man in his 40s described the double bind: “Some people… might just block me or not respond, I guess because they’re not interested in a Black guy. Then I have the ones who hit me up because they are interested in only Black guys.” When asked how being fetishized made him feel, he didn’t hesitate: “Uncomfortable.”
Users then develop strategies to identify fetishization, manage rejection and protect their dignity, which are skills no platform feature can replace.
Making Swipe Safety Universal
Major dating apps like Bumble, Tinder and Hinge have safety features such as profile verification and built-in video chat, but can’t protect everyone. The solution isn’t to wait for perfect platform design: it’s to equip users with knowledge and critical thinking skills that build their efficacy to respond to negative experiences and threats while promoting mental and emotional wellbeing.
Users need Swipe Safety education throughout the life course that reflects the distinct characteristics of each age group.
Photo credit: Nik on Unsplash
In schools, dating app safety should be integrated into health curricula alongside sexual health and consent. Students need to learn how to recognize manipulation, assess risk, understand how algorithms shape experiences and develop confidence to trust their instincts and set boundaries.
For adults, we need workshops and library programs tailored to those navigating apps after divorce or loss, building efficacy for handling unwanted attention, ghosting or discrimination. Education must also meet people on social media where users already share safety tips.
The dating landscape is evolving. Some people are leaving dating apps altogether, returning to in-person meetups. New platforms like Cerca emphasize face-to-face gatherings over swiping by hosting in-person events for members.
Swipe Safety proves this education is possible. We simply need to formalize it, expand it and make it accessible to everyone, from teenagers downloading their first app to grandparents swiping after loss. This is especially urgent for women, people of color and sexual and gender minorities who are disproportionately impacted by harassment, discrimination and fetishization on these platforms. Whether people meet on Hinge, at an event for The League, or through Instagram, they need critical skills: recognizing red flags, protecting personal information, assessing risk, and maintaining boundaries. Dating safely and with dignity requires informed, self-aware users fluent in swipe safety and platforms that are intolerant of bad actors.