This article was published on March 31, 2016

This dating app lets girls have friends spy on their conversations with dates


This dating app lets girls have friends spy on their conversations with dates

While there’s no shortage of dating apps to try your hand at, Boompi, the new kid on the block for iOS and Android has something a little different to offer – it lets women add their girlfriends to their private conversations with prospective dates so they can give advice or just watch the romance unfold in the background.

The friend invited to eavesdrop can also send messages within the conversation and can choose to appear in ‘Ghost Mode,’ which only allows them to view conversations and not appear in the app’s search.

This is all meant to be without the other person knowing. But surely if you meet a guy on this app then he can probably be certain that you’re using Boompi instead of Tinder or anything else because of its creepy snooping feature, so it’s not really that secretive.

Everyone who has ever used a dating app or just been texting someone they like has more than likely shown the messages to a friend at some point. However, it’s like an unwritten thing that nobody ever admits. Heck, I remember helping a friend concoct a break-up message for her then boyfriend when we were teenagers but I certainly doubt she ever told him she sought third-party assistance. Nobody likes to feel like they’re being spied on.

What Boompi is offering is the equivalent of having your partner’s phone tapped and letting everyone else listen in. Nobody liked when the NSA did it and no sane person is going to like this either.

It is a massive betrayal of trust and invasion of privacy, especially if the person you’ve met on the app is a stranger.

Another elephant in the room with Boompi is the fact that this feature is only available to its female users. While there are options to match with the same sex or both sexes, at no point can a man have another man eavesdrop like the female users can.

Trying to justify this, the app’s founder, Alejandro Ponce, told TechCrunch: “If every girl is on Boompi then every boy will want to join… Boys will be wherever girls are.”

This is the creators logic for making the app’s only ‘unique’ feature available exclusively to female users. In other words, he thinks women will love the idea of being sneaky so much that when they all sign up for the app in droves, men will obviously follow suit. Well, I can’t comment on its user figures right now but something tells me Tinder has nothing to worry about. 

If the idea behind Boompi is that men will be less inclined to be rude or inappropriate when they think a prospective date’s friends are watching, then by not making the snooping feature available for men’s friends, the creator’s are being quite suggestive. Women can be equally as rude or inappropriate as men when it comes to dating, so Boompi should make it an even playing field and offer the same deal to both sexes.

Via TechCrunch

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Also tagged with