Tinder Rolls Out Mandatory Facial Verification For New Users in U.S.

Tinder has begun enforcing its Face Check feature in the U.S., starting with the state of California, to help combat fake accounts, bots and romantic-scam activity on its platform. The app’s parent company, Match Group, says the rollout is an extension of global testing and represents a major shift from the previously voluntary verification tools offered by dating platforms.

Under Face Check, new users must record a short video selfie during the onboarding process. The system uses a biometric “face map” – a mathematical representation of facial shape rather than a stored image – to determine whether the person is a live human, whether their face matches the profile pictures submitted, and whether the same face appears elsewhere on the platform. Tinder says it deletes the actual video immediately after verification, though it retains the encrypted face map for duplicate-account detection.

According to Match Group’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, the feature “is really meant to be about confirming that this person is a real, live person and not a bot or a spoofed account.” The company says the initiative builds on earlier deployments in markets such as Canada and Colombia, where initial results showed reduction in duplicate or fraudulent profiles.

Tinder is positioning this move as part of a broader effort to restore user trust amid growing concerns about scams targeting dating-app users. The company cited that a significant volume of its content-moderation actions involves fake profiles and spam. Privacy concerns have already emerged in response to the new verification method. Under California’s data-protection laws – such as the CCPA and CPRA – biometric data must be handled carefully, and users may have rights to deletion or access. The rention of the encrypted face map is the point that some users are taking issue with, even if the video itself is deleted.