Rengarajan added, “the psychological price you pay” when you opt into dating-site memberships.Īs she put it, “You start to see yourself and others in very narrow terms as an assortment of checkboxes and labels.” Me So Far costs from $20 to $30 a person, but it is without, Ms.
“I think it’s really important that we build spaces and places for people to meet that don’t feel so data-driven or impersonal.”
“People were just sort of battle-weary from online dating,” said Lakshmi Rengarajan, 36, an advertising professional who said she founded Me So Far so that single people like herself could skip automated questions and create strong “dating ecosystems” instead. And it’s inspiring nascent sites like FriendlyLook,, and Coffee Meets Bagel, all of which try to make Internet dating more like small-town dating by enabling singles to meet through friends and colleagues.
Sitting home at night scrolling through online profiles can sometimes feel like the 21st-century equivalent of sitting in a bar alone, hoping to score.ĭesire for face-to-face introductions is also spurring the proliferation of geo-location dating apps like Grindr and Blendr, SinglesAroundMe, and Skout. There are slides of their living rooms, the insides of their refrigerators, even their debit-card statements.īeginning with these mini-monologues and ending with a happy hour, Me So Far is one in a spate of recently founded dating services that are spurning that purported fount of modern romance, the Internet.Īfter all, while the Web does broaden the dating pool, it has also disappointed scores of people (a fact that does not surprise social psychologists who recently reported that dating site algorithms are hardly scientific). Others reveal a time when they felt as if they had failed. Some speak of a song that changed their life. So, what do you think, which app is better? Are you comfortable with sharing your phone number with Signal? Give us your two cents in the comments below.That’s how long bachelors or bachelorettes are allowed to stand onstage narrating a PowerPoint presentation about themselves to nearly 75 eligible singles at Me So Far, a new monthly event in Chicago. The final choice boils down to you and what you expect from an encrypted messaging app. As mentioned, both apps are super secure and offer plenty of features to protect your communication. It would be unfair to pronounce one or the other app as the overall winner. With Two-Factor Authentication, you could be required to provide additional info and the company would log it. This is something that might change with a future update, though it’s not that simple. But Signal doesn’t provide support for Two-Factor Authentication. If you overlook the fact that you need to provide your phone number, there aren’t any negative sides. In other words, nobody can get your information unless they snatch your phone and somehow manage to log into the app.Īs for the security protocols, Signal uses Perfect Forward Secrecy and proprietary Signal protocol. In addition, they aren’t recoding whom you’ve been chatting with. That said, the app doesn’t log anything regarding your contacts or groups you’re in. The same goes for the time and date you joined and the date of your last log-in. The thing is, you need to provide a phone number when registering with the service and they keep that phone number on record. But some information is on Signal servers.
But don’t get this wrong, Wickr is also good in this respect.Īs for the actual storage protocols, the data lives on your device in an encrypted form. Signal goes the extra mile to secure your data. And similar to Wickr, it’s available on iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows. More importantly, Signal complies with GDPR 100%.