Facebook launching dating service to rival Tinder

Facebook is taking on Tinder in the online dating market by launching its own match-making app, Mark Zuckerberg announced last night.

Addressing Facebook’s F8 developers conference in San Jose, California, the social media tycoon said the the new dating service would focus on “building real long-term relationships, not just hook-ups”.

There are 200 million people on Facebook who list themselves as single, so clearly there’s something to do here,” Zuckerberg said.

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The dating feature will be an opt-in service that matches single users with people who they are “not already connected to” on Facebook, reports CNBC.

After activating the feature, users will be asked to list a real-world event they are interested in attending, the news site says. Their profile is then shared with other singletons who are also attending the event, and users can start a private conversation if they find someone they want to contact.

What separates the new service from the massively popular dating app Tinder is that Facebook already has a substantial amount of information on its users to help match singletons, says The Guardian.

Facebook also promises that users will not be matched with friends, so no one they know will see their dating profile. By contrast, Tinder users may potentially see someone they know while searching for a date.

With Facebook still in the spotlight over the “mass harvesting of personal data for use by Cambridge Analytica”, the company has designed the dating service “with privacy and security in mind”, Sky News adds.

Although Zuckerberg “did not apologise for the scandal” during the conference yesterday, he did stress that Facebook would “make sure that never happens again”.