Dating App Bumble Forgoes Facebook Authentication

Dating app Bumble has changed its login system so that its 30 million-plus users can bypass Facebook.

“Many of our users and prospective users asked for an alternative registration method,” Louise Troen, Bumble’s VP of international marketing and communications, said in an interview with Wired. “As always, empowering our users to make connections is our number one priority, and we wanted to continue to ensure our users felt safe while doing this.”

Facebook has been facing a firestorm over recent scandals, after 87 million of the site’s users may have had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica.

In addition, the company also recently revealed that “malicious actors” were able to use search tools to discover the identities and collect information on most of its two billion users worldwide.

First-time Bumble users had been required to share their Facebook profile with the app, which then imported their name, age, photos, and school or occupation in order to build a profile. It also gave the app access to other Facebook account information, including a user’s friends list, relationship status, current location and friends in common with other Bumblers.

For its part, Facebook was able to gather insights into the behavior of Bumble’s users and the mobile app economy.

But as of today (April 17), Bumble will allow its users to register and log in without sharing information with the social media network. Instead, people can log into the app with their phone number – although they can still log in via their Facebook account if they choose to do so.

It wouldn’t be surprising if users still logged in through Facebook. In the weeks since the data scandal, the social media site’s users largely haven’t changed their privacy settings.

“We have not seen wild changes in behavior with people saying ‘I’m not going to share any data with Facebook anymore,’” Facebook’s vice president of global marketing solutions, Carolyn Everson, said.

And last month, a poll conducted by Reuters and Ipsos found that 86 percent of people have not changed their login credentials on Facebook, Twitter or other social media platforms, while 78 percent have not even switched to “private mode” on their browsers.