https://arxiv.org/api/kp9u8KbF3ya0ysB34e+MdN1xbiM 2026-09-25T17:00:22Z 10 28 0 http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.27284v1 2026-06-25T17:00:59Z

Gay dating applications have become critical platforms for sexual minority men to seek relationships and community, yet they also expose users to deceptive interactions that remain underexplored in HCI and CSCW research. This study examines how gay male users in China experience, identify, and respond to deception on dating applications. Through semi-structured interviews with 22 participants across platforms including Blued, Aloha, Fanka, and Soul, we make three contributions. First, we identify a typology of deceptive practices extending beyond profile misrepresentation to encompass relational, emotional, financial, and commercial forms of deception. Second, we document the layered, probabilistic verification strategies users develop through long-term platform use, showing that trust assessment operates as a multi-signal, provisional process rather than a binary judgment. Third, we demonstrate that risk recognition is a collaborative practice shaped by the circulation of experience, the abstraction of recurrent tactics, and the codification of shared rules within the community.

2026-06-25T17:00:59Z Accept to CSCW 26 EA Yibo Meng Lyumanshan Ye Yingfangzhong Sun Bingyi Liu Huidi Lu Xiaolan Ding http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26407v3 2026-04-14T09:58:17Z

Matchmaking has become a prevalent part in contemporary applications, being used in dating apps, social media, online games, contact tracing and in various other use-cases. However, most implementations of matchmaking require the collection of sensitive/personal data for proper functionality. As such, with this work we aim to reduce the privacy leakage inherent in matchmaking applications. We propose H-Elo, a Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)-based, private rating system, which allows for secure matchmaking through the use of traditional rating systems. In this work, we provide the construction of H-Elo, analyse the security of it against a capable adversary as well as benchmark our construction in a chess-based rating update scenario. Through our experiments we show that H-Elo can achieve similar accuracy to a plaintext implementation, while keeping rating values private and secure. Additionally, we compare our work to other private matchmaking solutions as well as cover some future directions in the field of private matchmaking. To the best of our knowledge we provide one of the first private and secure rating system-based matchmaking protocols.

2026-03-27T13:34:30Z Accepted In Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY 26) Mindaugas Budzys Bin Liu Antonis Michalas 10.1145/3800506.3803498 http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16321v1 2026-01-22T21:08:17Z

Minors are at risk of myriad harms online, yet online dating romance scams are seldom considered one of them. While research of romance scams in Western countries finds victims to predominantly be middle-age, it is unknown if minors in geographic regions with cultural norms around teenage marriage are uniquely susceptible to online dating romance scams. We present an interview study with 16 victims of online dating romance scams in Iran who were minors when scammed. Findings show that, with westernized dating apps banned in Iran, scammers find teenage victims through messaging platforms tethered to local neighborhoods, offering relief for parental pressures around finding a marital partner and academic performance. Using threats, lies, and exploitation of emotional attachment lacking from their families, scammers pressured minors into financial and sexual favors. The study demonstrates how local cultural context should be foregrounded in future research on, and solutions for, technology-mediated harm against minors. Content Warning: This paper discusses sexual abuse.

2026-01-22T21:08:17Z 22 pages, 3 tables, CHI 2026 conference Sima Amirkhani Mahla Fatemeh Alizadeh Dave Randall Gunnar Stevens Douglas Zytko http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13558v1 2026-01-20T03:28:50Z

Men who have sex with men (MSM) are at elevated risk for sexually transmitted infections and harmful drinking compared to heterosexual men. Text data collected from social media and dating applications may provide new opportunities for personalized public health interventions by enabling automatic identification of risk and protective behaviors. In this study, we evaluated whether text from social media and dating apps can be used to predict sexual risk behaviors, alcohol use, and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake among MSM. With participant consent, we collected textual data and trained machine learning models using features derived from ChatGPT embeddings, BERT embeddings, LIWC, and a dictionary-based risk term approach. The models achieved strong performance in predicting monthly binge drinking and having more than five sexual partners, with F1 scores of 0.78, and moderate performance in predicting PrEP use and heavy drinking, with F1 scores of 0.64 and 0.63. These findings demonstrate that social media and dating app text data can provide valuable insights into risk and protective behaviors and highlight the potential of large language model-based methods to support scalable and personalized public health interventions for MSM.

2026-01-20T03:28:50Z Mehrab Beikzadeh Chenglin Hong Cory J Cascalheira Callisto Boka Majid Sarrafzadeh Ian W Holloway http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08782v1 2025-09-10T17:12:23Z

In Pakistan, where dating apps are subject to censorship, Facebook matrimony groups -- also referred to as marriage groups -- serve as alternative virtual spaces for members to search for potential life partners. To participate in these groups, members often share sensitive personal information such as photos, addresses, and phone numbers, which exposes them to risks such as fraud, blackmail, and identity theft. To better protect users of Facebook matrimony groups, we need to understand aspects related to user safety, such as how users perceive risks, what influences their trust in sharing personal information, and how they navigate security and privacy concerns when seeking potential partners online. In this study, through 23 semi-structured interviews, we explore how Pakistani users of Facebook matrimony groups perceive and navigate risks of sharing personal information, and how cultural norms and expectations influence their behavior in these groups. We find elevated privacy concerns among participants, leading them to share limited personal information and creating mistrust among potential partners. Many also expressed concerns about the authenticity of profiles and major security risks, such as identity theft, harassment, and social judgment. Our work highlights the challenges of safely navigating Facebook matrimony groups in Pakistan and offers recommendations for such as implementing stronger identity verification by group admins, enforcing stricter cybersecurity laws, clear platform guidelines to ensure accountability, and technical feature enhancements -- including restricting screenshots, picture downloads, and implementing anonymous chats -- to protect user data and build trust.

2025-09-10T17:12:23Z Mah Jan Dorazahi Deepthi Mungara Yasemin Acar Harshini Sri Ramulu http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01063v2 2026-01-28T16:02:39Z

Online dating platforms have fundamentally transformed the formation of romantic relationships, with millions of users worldwide relying on algorithmic matching systems to find compatible partners. However, current recommendation systems in dating applications suffer from significant algorithmic deficiencies, including but not limited to popularity bias, filter bubble effects, and inadequate reciprocity modeling that limit effectiveness and introduce harmful biases. This research integrates foundational work with recent empirical findings to deliver a detailed analysis of dating app recommendation systems, highlighting key issues and suggesting research-backed solutions. Through analysis of reciprocal recommendation frameworks, fairness evaluation metrics, and industry implementations, we demonstrate that current systems achieve modest performance with collaborative filtering reaching 25.1\% while reciprocal methods achieve 28.7\%. Our proposed mathematical framework addresses these limitations through enhanced similarity measures, multi-objective optimization, and fairness-aware algorithms that maintain competitive accuracy while improving demographic representation to reduce algorithmic bias.

2025-06-30T10:36:57Z This paper is withdrawn due to factual/methodological/other critical errors. It primarily synthesizes literature without original empirical validation/novel contributions (e.g., similarity measures from Xia et al.[2]; 28.7% claims from benchmarks). Core "proposed framework" lacks independent experiments, invalidating analysis. Do not cite prior versions Madhav Kotecha http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00607v3 2025-09-10T16:03:07Z

This paper examines monthly matching efficiency in the Japanese marriage market using novel data from IBJ, the country's largest structured matching platform. Unlike administrative or dating app data, IBJ provides full search, dating, and matching logs based on verified profiles and confirmed engagements. Users are highly selected into serious marriage search via costly screening. Covering 3.3% of national marriages annually, the data offer rare behavioral granularity. Using a nonparametric approach, I estimate time-varying matching functions and elasticities. Efficiency rises threefold over time, illustrating how digital intermediation transforms partner search in modern marriage markets.

2025-05-01T15:36:50Z 8 pages, 3 page appendix Suguru Otani http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11430v1 2025-02-17T04:39:47Z

Online dating is frequently used by individuals looking for potential relationships and intimate connections. Central to dating apps is the creation and refinement of a dating profile, which represents the way individuals desire to present themselves to potential mates, while hiding information they do not care to share. To investigate the way frequent users of dating apps construct their online profiles and perceive the effectiveness of strategies taken in making profiles, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 experienced users who are Chinese college-educated young adults and uncovered the processes and rationales by which they make profiles for online dating, particularly in selecting images for inclusion. We found that participants used idealized photos that exaggerated their positive personality traits, sometimes traits that they do not possess but perceive others to desire, and sometimes even traits they wish they had possessed. Users also strategically used photos that show personality and habits without showing themselves, and often hid certain identifying information to reduce privacy risks. This analysis signals potential factors that are key in building online dating profiles, providing design implications for systems that limit the use of inaccurate information while still promoting self-expression in relationship platforms.

2025-02-17T04:39:47Z 30 pages, 6 figures, to be published in CSCW 2025 Fan Zhang Yun Chen Xiaoke Zeng Tianqi Wang Long Ling RAY LC http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11810v3 2024-10-18T07:35:35Z

People who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) in China are increasingly exploring online platforms to connect with potential partners. This research explores the online dating experiences of DHH communities in China, an area that has not been extensively researched. We interviewed sixteen participants who have varying levels of hearing ability and love-seeking statuses to understand how they manage their identities and communicate with potential partners online. We find that DHH individuals made great efforts to navigate the rich modality features to seek love online. Participants used both algorithm-based dating apps and community-based platforms like forums and WeChat to facilitate initial encounters through text-based functions that minimized the need for auditory interaction, thus fostering a more equitable starting point. Community-based platforms were found to facilitate more in-depth communication and excelled in fostering trust and authenticity, providing a more secure environment for genuine relationships. Design recommendations are proposed to enhance the accessibility and inclusiveness of online dating platforms for DHH individuals in China. This research sheds light on the benefits and challenges of online dating for DHH individuals in China and provides guidance for platform developers and researchers to enhance user experience in this area.

2024-10-15T17:35:57Z Accepted to ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW2025) Beiyan Cao Changyang He Jingling Zhang Yuru Huang Muzhi Zhou Mingming Fan http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19783v1 2024-10-14T18:41:04Z

The rise of online dating apps has transformed how individuals connect and seek companionship, with an increase in usage among older adults. While these platforms offer opportunities for emotional support and social connection, they also present significant challenges, including a concerning trend of online dating scams targeting this demographic. To address these issues, we conducted a semi-structured interview focused on the online dating experiences of older adults (65+). Initially, we conducted a pre-screening survey, followed by focused semi-structured interviews with 11 of the selected older adults. Through this study, we investigate older adults' security and privacy concerns, the significance of design elements and accessibility, and identify areas needing improvement. Our findings reveal challenges such as deceptive practices, including catfishing and fraud, concerns over disclosing sensitive information, non-inclusive app design features, and the need for more informative visualization of match requests. We offer recommendations for enhanced identity verification, inclusive privacy controls by app developers, and increased digital literacy efforts to enable older adults to navigate these platforms safely and confidently.

2024-10-14T18:41:04Z IEEE BuildSEC'24 Building a Secure & Empowered Cyberspace Muskan Fatima Naheem Noah Sanchari Das