No more catfishing? Tinder is now requiring facial recognition in this US state

Tinder has started trying out facial recognition in a US state, but a wider rollout will only happen if users are on board.

David Uzondu Neowin · Jun 30, 2025 14:18 EDT with 8 comments

A hand holding a phone for a selfie where the screen says Tinder and is a photo of his face and says

Tinder is now mandating that new users in California verify their profiles using facial recognition technology, a move the company claims will "improve trust and safety" on its platform.

The way the Face Check works is that new users have to take a quick video selfie during the sign-up process. The technology, provided by a company called FaceTec, runs a biometric scan to confirm that you are a real, live person in front of the camera.

It then checks if the face in the video matches the photos on the profile and also scans to see if that same face has been used on other Tinder accounts. Once the verification is complete, the selfie video is supposedly deleted. What Tinder keeps is a "non-reversible, encrypted" face map, which it uses to help prevent the creation of duplicate or fraudulent profiles down the road.

As Axios notes, Tinder has already deployed Face Check in countries like Colombia and Canada, where executives say the results have been promising in reducing reports of bad actors.

Interestingly, the technology's provider, FaceTec, previously found itself in a legal fight regarding Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), for "failing to obtain explicit, written consent for its collection of biometric data." However, the company was eventually dropped from the lawsuit, with the reasoning being that FaceTec only provides the software to its clients, who are the ones that actually handle the user data.

According to Match Group's head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, the company plans to monitor user feedback from the California launch very closely to decide whether the mandatory verification should be implemented more widely across the United States or other regions.

In case you missed it, we recently reported on Tinder testing a new filter. After joking about it years ago, the company is now experimenting with a feature that allows some subscribers to set a "preferred" height for the profiles they see.

Source: Axios