Preserving User Privacy Through Ephemeral Sharing Design: A Large-Scale Randomized Field Experiment in Online Dating

Communication cold-start problems are pervasive in privacy-sensitive settings. To mitigate those problems, our research examined ephemeral sharing as a privacy-preserving mechanism to navigate the balance between users’ privacy concerns and information sharing in the initial interaction stages in online dating. In partnership with Summer, a leading online dating platform, we report a large-scale randomized field experiment with over 70k users to understand how ephemeral sharing influences users’ information sharing behavior and subsequent match outcomes. We find that the subject in the ephemeral group achieves a significantly larger number of personal photos along with their matching request, a more significant number of initial matches, and higher conversational engagement from receivers. Further, our sequential mediation tests further show that the increased sharing of personal photos is the primary mechanism. Our study contributes to the literature on the design of matching platforms and provides actionable implications for the privacy-preserving design of matching platforms.