Mobile apps can be very, very helpful. They can help you shop, heck, they can even help you from drunk dialling your ex boyfriend. However, I’m beginning to wonder if apps are now trying to be too helpful.
Case in point the i192 app that can tell you whether or not your date (or the dude you just spent an entire evening chatting to) is married.
But, it doesn’t stop there, as the app can claims it can also tell you if he’s lying about his age (18% of folks apparently lie about their age in social situations) or if he’s still living with his mom. How does it do all this? 192.com, the creator of the i192 app, has access to almost 50 million records on people and businesses. (Scary, non?)
The app is for iPhones only, and despite all of the stalking it allows you to do, it's free.
While men do lie about being married, where they live, where they work, or even their age (as do women), I’m wondering if using an app to quickly stalk your date on the go isn’t just taking it a step too far. Why? Well, there’s a couple of reasons...
The first being, as the screenshot on iTunes shows, there can be many results for a single name. So, just because your date’s name is Mark Smith, doesn’t necessarily mean that the Mark Smith you’ve found who is married and living in Croydon instead of being single and living in Hampstead Heath like he said he did is the right guy. Plus, people move quite frequently. People get divorced. How up-to-date is the information on i192?
The second, surely we all already Google the people we meet. We see if they’re on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, and we try to gather what their digital footprint is like. However, using an app that has access to millions of public records to try to suss out some guy seems like a bad replacement for using your own judgement and trusting your gut.
I’ve heard women describe how they were involved with men for years who they didn’t realize had a wife and children – however, the more you talk to these women, you realize the signs were staring them in the face. (He would only ever text her, wouldn’t tell him where she lives, etc.) Do we really need an app to confirm our suspicions that someone is a lying douchebag?!
Perhaps apps like this can help single women work out the frogs from the princes, but I sincerely doubt it. The i192 app just looks like another way for the paranoid and the neurotic to engage and indulge in even further ways of obsessing about men.
