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Tinder will ban under-18s from using its app

Tinder will ban under-18s from using its app

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Tinder will bar people ages 17 and younger from using its swipe-happy dating app from next week, the company has announced. This is a change to its original policy that allowed teenagers between the ages of 13 to 17 to hold an account and use the service. Rosette Pambakian, Tinder's VP of communications, explained the change in a statement. "On a platform that has facilitated over 11 billion connections, we have the responsibility of constantly assessing our different user experiences," Pambakian wrote. "Consistent with this responsibility, we have decided to discontinue service for under 18 users."

Teenage users of the app will find their Tinder accounts discontinued next week. Since the service launched in 2012, users who indicated they were between 13 and 17 on their Facebook profiles have only been able to match with others of the same age bracket, rather than the wider pool of Tinder users — but there wasn't much to stop people falsely pretending to be either older or younger than they were in order to sign up. The company says it's only losing 3 percent of its global user base in locking under-18s out of its service, but that it believes "it's the right thing to do," having been reviewing its policy on the matter since last year.