Monday, April 20, 2026

Alarmed by Dating App Violence, California Lawmaker Proposes a ‘Scarlet Letter’

By Lynn La, CALMATTERS

A person uses their phone in Escondido on April 20, 2023. Photo by Lauren Justice for CalMatters

A bill to protect people on online dating apps from violence has critics arguing that the measure would put a “scarlet letter” on certain users.

But that’s a feature, not a bug in the proposal.

The Senate’s public safety committee this week passed a bill that would require online dating services to run criminal background checks on California users. If the user is a registered sex offender or has been convicted of a violent felony, domestic violence, an assault or a hate crime, the dating service must “place a flag” on the user’s profile to let others know.

Bill author Sen. Caroline Menjivar said that “dating apps have not provided an adequate level of safety for their users.” At the hearing she cited a 2019 Columbia Journalism Investigations survey that found that more than a third of women polled said they were sexually assaulted or raped by someone they met on a dating app.

The Markup, which is part of CalMatters, last year published an investigation that showed people accused of sexual violence managed to stay on the apps even after victims reported them.

• Menjivar, a Van Nuys Democrat: “If women, mostly women, continue to be raped or murdered — like another woman (who) was murdered and her body was set on fire last year after a man met her on a dating app — those are the incidents we’re looking to prevent.”

But besides labeling users with a “scarlet letter,” implementing the policy would require dating platforms to collect a significant amount of personal data to avoid misidentifying users, argued Jose Torres, a deputy executive director for the industry group TechNet.

In a rare break with his Democratic colleagues, Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco voted against the bill, saying it might have “significant unintended consequences in terms of people’s privacy.” But Wiener’s opposition, along with Republican Sen. Kelly Seyarto of Murrieta, was not enough to stop the bill from advancing out of the six-member committee, according to CalMatters Digital Democracy database.

With four Democratic lawmakers giving the green light, Menjivar said she plans to amend the measure in response to criticism related to the categories of crime and operational challenges — and that legislators are “going to see a dramatically different bill” when it’s presented to the privacy committee on April 20.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.