If the only thing standing between you and deleting Facebook was the thought of not being able to judge a stream of strangers on their bangability, we’ve got good news!
At some point today, a new Bumble feature will kick in: the ability to register for an account using a phone number.
Previously, you could only sign up via Facebook Login.
“The reason behind this improvement is due to the overwhelming request from prospective users who are not too fond of Facebook and, because of this, refused to give online dating a try,” a Bumble PR staffer told Ars Technica in an email.
This is not how you delete Facebook, but it’s just as satisfying.
So if you’re one of those people who have, like, boundaries or whatever when it comes to throwing huge troves of your personal data at faceless corporations who do evil s**t with it, you can now join us gullible sheeple in the digital cesspool of unsolicited schlong shots and acknowledging familiar faces on the street only to realise you ghosted them after a drunk chat a month ago.
Of course, just like when you’re getting your hopes up swiping through someone’s pics only to find a photo of them at a festival doing duckface in blackface with their arm around Kyle Sandilands, there’s a catch.
Reading between the lines, it seems that this is just for new users – meaning you can’t just switch your login credentials over from being Facebook-based to number-based.
You can always start a new account with your phone number. You’ll lose your current matches, but if you’re really meant to be, you’ll find each other again and then continue to only text every three weeks about how you’re still so busy.
The other benefit of the Facebook linkup, apart from making signing up easier, was that it made it that much harder for people to create multiple or fake profiles for catfishing or cheating purposes (or both!).
Bumble says they’ll still be encouraging users to verify their accounts – a process that involves getting you to take a selfie in a specific pose so they can check it’s really you in your photos.
And there have been some security and functionality issues with online dating recently, ones that could have left de-identified information available to hackers – and any time you give identifiable information like you phone number to a corporation, it’s a risk.
But given that the biggest ones were to do with the way the apps interacted with Facebook’s API, this is probably a move in the right direction.
And hopefully, it will mean the beginning of the end of Bumble profiles with the multicoloured Facebook profile filters on. It’s nice and all that you still stand with Paris, guys, but now I know that picture’s two and a half years old.