It’s reader question time on TechJunkie, and this time it’s about the other dating app Bumble. The full question was: ‘Does Bumble exclude and filter your Facebook friends? Me and a match have many friends in common, but we only see a few of them on Bumble.’ It’s a question worth investigating, if any.
Bumble is quickly gaining ground on Tinder thanks to its unique way of working. By allowing women to initiate conversations, she attracts more female users. This attracts more male users and forces everyone to play their game. As someone who always puts emphasis on quality over quantity, this sounds very good to me.
Like Tinder, Bumble uses Facebook to create your profile. Also like Tinder, it’s a giver, not a taker, so Facebook won’t alert your friends that you’re on Bumble or post anything to Facebook while using the app.
Does Bumble filter Facebook friends?
One downside of these apps that use Facebook is the risk of seeing your friends, colleagues or colleagues in the app. Or seeing you. Original questions asking if Bumble filters or excludes Facebook friends, and the answer is we really don’t know. I tried some experiments with a group of friends to find out.
I had 13 friends in common with a friend with whom I conducted this experiment. It was showing only 7 on our profiles. Another friend and I had 42 mutual friends, mostly from college, but only 27 of them showed up on Bumble. While this is a very limited experiment, it does indicate that some sort of filtering or exclusion has occurred. Either that or there’s a glitch in how Bumble estimates Facebook friend data.
According to Bumble, it will collect your name, username, email address, phone number, gender, date of birth, sexual orientation, pictures, location, and login. It will also access your friends lists and data from Instagram and other social media accounts you have linked to Facebook. He says he will only publicly share what he needs, but hasn’t said anything about filtering, exclusions, or how Bumble works.
Bumble without Facebook
If ‘bumping’ with mutual friends or acquaintances on Bumble scares you, there’s good news. As of April 2018, Bumble added a way to create a profile without using Facebook. Instead, you’ll be able to sign in and create an account with just your phone number, and you won’t have to link the two accounts.
This is a response to people moving away from Facebook and understandably more concerned about the data they put on the social network. Recent data sharing scandals and Facebook’s way of intervening in modern life have caused thousands of people to close their accounts. Bumble doesn’t want this to affect membership, so it introduced a way to use the dating app without Facebook.
“Many of our users and potential users have wanted a way to sign up for Bumble without connecting their Facebook account, and we’re excited to roll out this feature to our users starting today,” said Jessica Collins, Head of Product Marketing at Bumble. Notice of April 16, 2018. “We are excited to continue to scale to new communities globally, while maintaining the Bumble experience our users know and love.”
This is very welcome news for any Bumble user who wants to keep the two sides of their life completely separate. Bumble used Facebook to streamline the registration process and verify identity. It was always easier to select ‘Sign in with Facebook’ and let the app do the rest. We didn’t know how risky this would be. Thanks to Cambridge Analytica, we now know that we should never use Facebook to log into anything that uses personal data.
Do it yourself
You can now sign up for Bumble using your phone number, which makes a lot of sense to do just that. Existing users may want to recreate their Bumble profile, and new users will definitely want to use the phone option instead of Facebook. This means you’ll have to make your own profile and pictures and upload them yourself, but it also means you have full control over who can see what and when.
The only thing Bumble hasn’t said yet is how they will verify accounts. One of the great things about Bumble is that it’s a lot less scam than other dating apps out there. Using Facebook to verify accounts was a useful way to at least check if someone was genuine. Without this element, how will Bumble check the legitimacy of its users? I can’t find an answer to this at the moment, so I suggest you be more careful when meeting people who use the app.
