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This chapter explores the ethical complexities of researching location-aware social discovery Smartphone applications (apps) and how they mediate contemporary experiences of travel. We highlight the context-specific approach required to carrying out research on Tinder, a location-aware app that enables people to connect with others in close proximity to them. By journeying through the early stages of our research project, we demonstrate how ethical considerations and dilemmas began long before our project became a project. We discuss the pulls toward data extraction/mining of user-generated content (i.e., Tinder user profiles) within digital social research and the ethical challenges of using this data for research purposes. We focus particularly on issues of informed consent, privacy, and copyright, and the differences between manual and automated data mining/extraction techniques. Excerpts from our university ethics application are included to demonstrate how our research sits uneasily within standardized ethical protocols. Our moves away from a ‘big data’ approach to more ‘traditional’ and participatory methodologies are located within questions of epistemology and ontology including our commitment to practicing a feminist research ethic. Our chapter concludes with the lessons learned in the aim to push forward with research in challenging online spaces and with new data sources.

This paper determines how travel intentions can be predicted using self-disclosure behaviour, trust and intimacy. This case study focuses on Tinder users who utilised the application's Passport feature which allowed them to travel virtually and interact with other users around the globe amid global travel restrictions.

This quantitative research conveniently sampled 294 Tinder users who used the Passport feature during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Data were analysed using PLS-SEM.

This study revealed that self-disclosure had a significant influence towards future travel intentions. Findings show that the more users self-disclose, the more their intent to travel increase. Trust and intimacy also had significant relationship on travel intentions while intimacy had a mediating effect between self-disclosure and travel intentions.

Tourism-oriented establishments and destination marketers should consider Tinder users as a market segment of future tourists. These users have developed travel intentions through in-app interactions and thus comprise an untapped market of potential tourists seeking for meet-ups and niche experiences in a post-pandemic era.

This study provides novelty in showing the predictive relationship of self-disclosure, trust and intimacy towards travel intentions. A model consisting of these constructs in the context of online interactions was also empirically tested and found adequate to predict travel intentions.

This study aims to understand if an online dating app is considered an acceptable channel to conduct advertising activities and understand the differences between Generations X, Y and Z for such acceptance.

A total of 411 Tinder users’ reactions were obtained and analyzed using text mining to compute the sentiment score of each response, and a Kruskal–Wallis H test to verify if there are statistical differences between each generation.

The results showed positive acceptability toward the marketing campaign on Tinder, especially Z Generation. Nevertheless, the statistical analysis revealed that the differences between each generation are not statistically significant.

The main limitation relates to the fact that the participants, during the data collection, revealed their identification, perhaps leading to acquiescence bias. In addition, the study mainly covered the male population. A balanced sample would be positive to examine any possible differences between gender.

Results provide an essential indication for companies regarding their marketing activities conducted on Tinder to fully exploit the possibility of using Tinder as an alternative and valuable channel to conduct marketing activities.

Up until now, no studies tried to understand the effect of a marketing activity online on an online dating app.

In recent years, the use of dating and hook up apps has become an increasingly socially acceptable and commonly used method of seeking romantic and sexual partners. This has seen a corresponding rise in media and crime reports of sexual harms facilitated through these services, including sexual harassment, unsolicited sexual imagery, and sexual assault. Emerging empirical research shows that experiences of sexual harms in this context are common and predominantly impact women and girls. The aim of this chapter is to examine the sociocultural and sexual norms that underpin online dating and which perpetuate a “rape culture” within which sexual harms become both possible and normalized. This chapter also considers how the discourses that minimize and legitimize sexual harms are encoded within the responses undertaken by dating and hook up apps to sexual harms. It is argued that together these norms and discourses may act to facilitate and/or prevent sexual harms, and may normalize and excuse these harms when they occur.

A total of 25 years of research on the audit society has provided rich and engaging accounts of the ways in which rituals of verification have conditioned organizations and individuals to think and act. In contrast, this paper aims to explore the possibility of conditions through which things and spaces are enacted to be non-auditable.

Using the concept of proliferation and rarefaction (Callon and Law, 2005), the paper adopts a case-comparison design to explore two empirical sites. The first investigates a vast excess of audit structures against the case of the biggest corporate fraud in German accounting history, the Wirecard scandal. The second discusses the configuration of Tinder, the most popular provider of mobile dating and the absence of visible verification mechanisms.

The paper argues that things can become non-auditable through two mechanisms. Based on the two empirical sites, non-auditability can happen through an overload of auditable resources or, through the withdrawal of required resources. The paper discusses the consequences of this finding and suggests avenues for future research on non-auditability.

While accounting scholars have extensively addressed the audit explosion and traced how audit practices have journeyed into ever more novel terrains, this paper discusses forms of escape from the value-subverting and reductive accounts incorporated in the audit society. It thereby points to conditions under which accounting ends.

The purpose of this study is to understand how young consumers engage in the multi-category context. To that end, engagement on the focal product (dating platforms) and the other product (matrimony platforms) were studied. The objective is to find an answer to the following research question: Why do consumers tend to engage more with the focal product, yet are likely to purchase its complement or substitute?

Semi-structured depth interviews and Straussian grounded theory method were used to collect, analyze and interpret the data.

Self-determination theory provides an answer to the research question. This study suggests: young consumers experience different levels of need fulfilment when they evaluate the focal product in the single-category and in the multi-category contexts; young consumers’ motivational orientation (controlled motivation, autonomous motivation and intrinsic motivation) results into high-level behavior and engagement (pleasure-seeking, platform abandonment, goal-oriented pleasure-seeking, goal-oriented problem-solving, anxious and outsourcing) with the focal product and the other product.

Value of the paper lies in developing a grounded theory framework for engagement in the multi-category context. This study can help practitioners in making important business decisions, especially in the dating and matrimony e-business categories.