This is how Facebook’s new Secret Crush feature is going to work
Would you tell Facebook your secret crush?
During the F8 Facebook conference this week, even the CEO himself, Mark Zuckerberg, couldn’t keep a straight face when he talked about the social network’s “privacy focused” future.
“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly.” the Facebook boss said, his face adorned with a sheepish smile, with knowing guffaws coming from the audience.
He’s right. Facebook has been embroiled with several privacy and security themed scandals. The social network allowed political companies to scrape data on users through innocent looking apps. They were caught storing passwords in plaintext. They were caught using phone numbers given to them for 2FA to scrape phone contacts. They were caught forcing new users to give their email passwords away so they could scrape their email address book. And they were allowing anyone to pair a person’s phone number with their profile information. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
So it is with perhaps a touch of irony that during the very same F8 conference, Facebook also said they’d like to know who your “secret crush” is, for their new upcoming dating feature, aptly named “Secret Crush”.
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Secret Crush is simple. A Facebook user can pick up to nine Facebook friends that they’d like to date. Those friends get a notification that they have a secret crush, but they are not told who it is. It is only if they return the affection by also selecting that same user in their own crush list will both users be told of a match and have their identities revealed to each other.
If the object of affection doesn’t reciprocate, then no match is revealed, and they will be left wondering who it was that initiated the secret crush notification.
The Secret Crush feature was announced to bolster the Facebook Dating platform that was announced last year in 2018 and has since been experiencing a staggered roll-out, currently available in Thailand, Canada, Colombia and 14 new countries in Asia. As such, Secret Crush will only be readily available in those countries for now, though both Facebook Dating (and with it, Secret Crush) will soon be available in Europe and the US at some point soon.
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Facebook Dating allows users to create a second profile designed to search for romantic connections instead of social ones. The second dating profile is kept separate from a user’s main profile and operates on a first name only basis. Previously, potential matches on the Facebook Dating profile have been kept exclusively outside of a user’s main friends list. So the purpose of Secret Crush appears to be to allow users to search for love a little closer to home.
But given Facebook’s track record on privacy, would you trust Mark Zuckerberg with the identities of your crushes? Or indeed, would you give Facebook enough information about yourself to construct a dating profile?
If many people say yes, Facebook could be giving sites like Tinder, Grinder and Bumble a run for their money given Facebook’s treasure trove of information on their users could very well garner more insightful matches.
For more announcements at Facebook F8, see our post here.