Will you trust your private genitals to Facebook's new dating app?

By Sean O'Neal | May 1, 2018 | 6:58pm

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Facebook has taken a lot of heat lately for its reckless sharing of private data, a widening controversy—in tandem with concurrent controversies over misinformation in its news feed and an employee allegedly using user info to cyber-stalk women—that has seen founder Mark Zuckerberg congressionally poked, as many have declared that they’re walking away from the social network for good. But maybe you’d care less about all these dizzying invasions of privacy and abuse of consumer trust if you were getting laid on the reg? And so, Facebook announced today that it will be adding a new dating service—sharing your most personal information with third parties, sure, but this time only because you agree that this is the cyber-Faustian bargain we must make to enjoy even the most fleeting of human connections in this cold, digital world. What are you going to do—walk up to someone in a bar and just start talking? What kind of fucking weirdo does that?

The dating feature, unveiled at today’s F8 developers conference, will be completely optional: You alone have the power to choose whether to allow Facebook to share your information, or to just give up and die alone. Also, your new, completely separate dating profile will be kept private from your friends, seeing as Facebook promises not to match you with anyone you already know and trust. Rather, Facebook is taking one of its most popular features—the ability to be messaged at random by a complete stranger—and combining it with the expectation of sex.

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“This is going to be for building real, long-term relationships—not just for hookups,” Zuckerberg said, presumably followed by a hollow, knowing laugh. During his presentation, Zuckerberg also described how he once met a couple who told him how they’d first connected on Facebook, which he says they punctuated by gesturing at their kids. It’s the sort of heartwarming story that underlines Mark Zuckerberg’s longstanding mission to create genuine, meaningful relationships out of the site he built to rank college girls’ faces, then turned into a billion-dollar data-harvesting operation for advertisers and Russian trolls—all so you could someday find true love.

Upon news of the announcement, shares in Match Group—owner of dating services like OkCupid and the already-Facebook-connected Tinder—dropped around 19 percent, suggesting investors have already savvily predicted that most people will simply shrug and yield control of their romantic lives to Facebook as well, since why not, it already has everything else.