Bumble: Women don’t want AI-generated romance. We want safety.

The petition to Bumble leaders including Founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd and Bumble Board of Directors reads: 

Bumble built its brand by marketing itself as a safer, more empowering dating app for women. Recently, you announced new AI features that threaten to undermine that trust. And as a coalition of women, survivors, and allies, we reject it.

Reports on your new AI system, “Bee,” say that it will encourage users to share deeply personal information — including intimate thoughts, relationship goals, insecurities, communication styles, and sexual preferences — to better generate AI-powered matches for users. According to recent reporting, these features will be central to the app experience and enabled by default unless users actively opt out.

Women and marginalized communities already face enormous privacy and safety risks online. Dating apps collect some of the most sensitive personal information imaginable and expanding AI-driven data collection without meaningful, explicit consent puts users at even greater risk for surveillance, data breaches, harassment, stalking, assault, and other harms and misuse of personal information.

We urge Bumble to:

• Make all AI-powered matching and data collection tools strictly opt-in, not opt-out.
• Guarantee that personal user data gained through “Bee” will never be sold, licensed, or shared with third parties for advertising, AI training, or profiling purposes, and commit to mitigating any risks of unauthorized third-party data scraping.
• Publicly commit to minimizing data collection rather than normalizing deeper surveillance of users’ personal lives.

Women should not have to give up their privacy just to use a dating app. If Bumble truly wants to be a company “for women,” it must prioritize consent and user safety over AI hype.

Bumble built its reputation as the “feminist Tinder,” marketing itself as a safer dating app for women. That promise has always been a shaky one, especially when it comes to privacy. In fact, UltraViolet helped force Bumble to strengthen its privacy policy in 2024. But now the company is backsliding big time by preparing to roll out an invasive new AI system that would encourage users to share deeply personal information--including intimate thoughts, insecurities, relationship goals, and sexual preferences--in order to generate AI-powered “matches.” The worst part? There is no clear “opt-in” plan, meaning it’s likely that every user will automatically be enrolled into this AI tool.

Women are already told to protect our location, limit what we share online, and stay alert for stalking, harassment, scams, and surveillance, including (if not especially) on dating apps. Expanding AI-driven data collection on dating apps without meaningful opt-in consent puts women, gender-expansive people, and all vulnerable groups at even greater risk.

Once companies collect this kind of intimate information, users lose control over where it ends up or how it may be used in the future. A data breach, hack, or policy change could expose private details that go way beyond a normal dating profile like sexual orientation, geolocation, and family planning preferences. The AI wouldn’t just know who you want to date--it could build a detailed psychological profile based on your emotions, vulnerabilities, and private desires.

Bumble should not force users to trade their privacy for access to a dating app. Sign the petition now to demand that Bumble make all invasive AI features strictly opt-in and put women’s privacy ahead of AI hype and data collection.