Lately, some dating applications have been attracting lots of people. This is a new style of dating based on social network services(SNS). These dating applications give people some good services from the most basic ways to the more complex ways. For instance, people who want to date someone can figure out whether he or she fits with them well or not by searching for some information such as marital status, personality and appearance. People can even investigate people’s profiles and send text messages before they meet each other. In other words, people find a person whom they want to date, send and receive some messages, meet each other and finally date if both are fine with each other. As the number of people who use dating apps grows, there is a newly coined expression, ‘social dating’.
  Among various kinds of dating applications, there are a few popular dating applications such as ‘I-um’ and ‘Noon Date’, which have over 1 million users. According to the official web sites of these apps, when a person makes a new account, he or she needs to put more than 1 or 2 pictures that show his or her face clearly and he or she also needs to fill out profile information like a job, age, gender, hobbies, etc. Then, a manager who manages these accounts will check them to make sure that there are no people who misrepresent the information and will make several services mentioned above available to them if their information is credible. In terms of matching with others, the app users can make a group with a type of people whom they like to meet, the age they prefer, or the interests that they want their dates to have. Finally, the app users are able to send or to reply to messages, but there is a limited number of messages per day. According to their needs, some of the apps  charge cash to buy some items which help people find matches more easily, allow people to send more text messages, or allow them to give away presents. An anonymous CBNU student, who used a social dating application once before, said, “My friend introduced me to an app, so out of curiosity I started using the app. When I first contacted an unknown girl, I felt kind of nervous and afraid. I met her in a cafe and we have not kept in touch after meeting.”
  As the number of people who use dating apps is growing, some problems occur. One of the frequent problems is that people try to misrepresent personal identities. For example, they put others’ pictures on profiles or put wrong information for a fake reputation like a forged academic background or a forged job. For instance, girl A used another girl B’s name on dating apps illegally because she found that her ex-boyfriend started to meet girl B, so she tried to break them up. Moreover, one man got a request for a meeting from a woman, and then he accepted it and he met her without any doubt. However, one day, she encouraged him to go to a sale product seminar. In fact, she was a member of a pyramid scheme. There is also another case of stalking that one woman suffered. This woman met a guy on a dating application, and the guy kept on sending messages to her frequently although she didn’t want to talk with him. Even after she refused to talk to him, he sent some nude pictures creepily. In terms of money scams, an office worker met a woman on a dating app and the woman offered prostitution. When the office worker accepted and tried to meet her, after transferring about 200,000 won to her account, she had already taken the money and disappeared.
  Student Kim Hong-jun(’15, Dept. of Mathematics) in CBNU said about a dating application, “There might be quite a few people who abuse the characteristics of online anonymity where people can’t see people’s faces in person and it could be a new cyber sexual crime type.”
  Crime experts said that prostitution workers used to find commercial sex on some online chatting sites in the past, but now, they are trying to move their market into smart phones which have more demand as the number of people using smartphones is increasing nowadays. To sum up, there are some problems of using social dating applications. Even though companies of dating applications try to promote their apps by showing people some good cases, there are still recurrent crimes like abusing identities, money scams, or some sexual problems.

By Oh Byung-hyun
bh37@cbnu.ac.kr