You’ve been matched according to your mullet; you’ve successfully sought your gene partner; found love by first smell and even courted singles with the same food allergy. For sure, it’s getting harder and harder to come up with a quirky idea for a dating app. Words of Heart, however, has managed to add a rather interesting spin to the formula by creating a matchmaking system based on passwords, of all things. The basic premise is that the passwords represent your innermost thoughts, therefore they are the ideal link between daters. And we thought Ghost Singles was weird…
Words of Heart is nowhere near as layered as OkCupid or eHarmony, but at least it’s completely free for everyone. The ‘signup’ only requires a username, a password and a profile picture, while adding any other form of contact – such as email, Twitter or Facebook – is optional. After finishing the registration the system checks the database for a matching password. If you are lucky and someone else shares your thoughts and interests then their information will be displayed. If not, then you will be left empty-handed.
It’s safe to say that Words of Heart is a novel idea but nothing more. The site lacks a proper browsing tab that could be used to find more results, as well as there being no form of built-in chat. All that’s left is contact address that is provided by your partner, and if no such information is available then you are out of luck. The site also lacks any restrictions and rules, meaning it isn’t possible to set your gender and in return cannot vet the results to find singles with a particular gender, age range or ethnicity.
The registration process is very loose, too, meaning it’s easy to mass-produce profiles with the same picture and a slightly different name and password to harvest as many results as possible. At the end of the day, a matchmaking system based on a single word isn’t all that effective and produces fewer results than a professional dating app.
Not being on par with other dating apps isn’t the only problem with Words of Heart. A group of privacy-conscious netizens have criticized the site’s premise, claiming that the whole app is unsecure. Dubbing it “Plenty of Phis”, they pointed out that the password is sent in plain-text to the server without any encryption. The dangers of a totally unprotected database containing people’s most precious information should be fairly obvious.
We believe Words of Heart has the best of intentions, but they should be more responsible with the data that they have on hands. The lack of a privacy policy isn’t reassuring either. Even if they don’t sell the information to third party companies they could still easily fall prey to a hacker attack. They wouldn’t be the first dating app to be targeted by malicious information thieves, after all.
The site’s creators are aware of the potential security risk and they warn users not to use their real passwords, but this won’t change the fact that compromising any information in this way is careless.
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