Equipping Daters for Safer Offline Meetups
This article is brought to you by Sfara’s Content Partnership with Global Dating Insights. Sfara offers smartphone-based, personal safety features, providing industry-leading safety services for easy integration into your dating app.
The frequency of dangerous actions connected to online dating apps is increasing at an alarming rate, with growing awareness and statistics occurring around the globe.
A survey conducted by the BBC revealed that of those who’ve used dating platforms in the previous four years, 25 percent have experienced sexual assault while on a date. The report also stated that sexual offenses have doubled between 2017 and 2020, with more than 6,000 people having reported crimes linked to online dating platforms.
In that same four-year span, a U.S. university study found that 14 percent of the nearly two thousand rapes committed by acquaintances occurred during a first date arranged through a dating app.
Additionally, the Australian Institute of Criminology shared that three-out-of-four survey respondents had been subjected to sexual violence facilitated through dating apps in the last five years.
While dating apps have made advances in tackling other threats to their user base (scammers, catfishes, security issues), the realm of offline, personal safety is still relatively unexplored. But this gap in the safety net is where Sfara can assist.
Here, Sfara explains safety features that equip dating app users for the IRL dates.
Solutions to Safer Offline Dates
Sfara provides several safety tools that support daters during offline encounters and meetups. Each of the tools presents a different method of calling for help, used for different situations.
But calling for help doesn’t mean going straight to law enforcement. It can mean going to an intervening safety agent, specially trained in handling situations. So, even in an escalating situation, the user is comfortable calling for help, if even to interrupt the situation and avoid possible worsening consequences.
If necessary, safety agents do work with law enforcement to dispatch assistance to the dater.
Sfara’s safety tools include:
- Check-In Timer
- Triple-Tap™
- Walk With Me
- Manual SOS button
Here’s how each of them support the user in various situations.
Before any date, Sfara suggests users set a Check-In Timer. Once the timer is started, Sfara’s Triple-Tap™ is activated. With Triple-Tap, users can tap the phone three times, on the front or back—even through a pocket or a purse—to be connected with a safety agent. So, if a date, or the evening, starts to go awry, users tap their phones three times to discreetly call for help.
One of the great things about Triple-Tap™ is that when the user feels unsafe, they don’t need to worry about troublesome steps, such as entering lock-screen passcodes, in order to seek help.
The Check-in Timer itself is an additional safety feature. Once the Check-In Timer expires, a safety agent automatically calls to check-in (if the user hasn’t already dismissed the timer with a PIN). If the check-in call is unanswered, local law enforcement may be notified immediately, if the safety agent finds it necessary.
Daters can use the timer this way: If a date is supposed to end at ten o’clock, the user can set the timer for ten fifteen to get a call. That way, he or she can use the call to change their current situation, or if feeling safe, simply set a new timer to extend the evening.
Yet another feature helps daters feel safe walking through areas where they might otherwise feel unsafe, such as when walking through a dark parking lot after the end of a successful date. In this situation, they can make use of the Walk With Me feature to connect with a safety agent and have that person stay on the line as the user makes their way to the car or destination.
For all times and all instances, a manual SOS button is always available. A user simply presses the manual SOS button to connect with a safety agent.
For daters, this provides another layer of security to their dating experience, with the dating app equipping them with safety features for online and offline experiences.
The Next Steps
After partnering with Sfara, dating app developers can choose the safety features they wish to integrate, while maintaining total control over the UI / UX of their app. Sfara’s safety solutions will quietly run in the background, waiting for the user to activate them through the app’s UI.
The adoption process is seamless & affordable with easy SDK + SaaS integration. Most companies can get these features up and running within six to eight weeks.
When it comes to user privacy, sensitive personal data is always controlled by the dating app developer.
Contact Details
To find out more about how dating apps can empower users with enhanced personal safety features, get in touch with personalsafety@sfara.com
