California Just Advanced Two Bills That Would Force Dating Apps to Run Background Checks on You

Dating apps have spent a decade collecting your photos, your location, and your swipe history. What they haven't collected, in most cases, is a criminal record check. That's about to change in California, where two bills moving through the state legislature this year would force Tinder, Hinge, and every other Match Group property to start screening users for violent criminal histories — and answer for what happens when they don't.

The more aggressive of the two, SB 1390, comes from state Sen. Caroline Menjivar. It would require online dating services to run criminal background checks on California users, and if someone is a registered sex offender or has a conviction for a violent felony, domestic violence, assault, or a hate crime, the app would have to flag their profile so other users can see it.

Menjivar's argument is blunt: dating apps have not provided an adequate level of safety for their users. The bill leans on a case that made national headlines — cardiologist Stephen Matthews, convicted in 2025 on 35 criminal counts including drugging and sexually assaulting multiple women he met through dating platforms. Menjivar's office points out that most apps' terms of service already bar convicted violent offenders from signing up — they just never check. As she put it: SB 1390 is designed to close that gap.

The bill isn't finished cooking. After clearing the Senate's public safety committee, lawmakers are already reworking the categories of crime and the operational logistics before it heads to the privacy committee — a sign of how messy "just run a background check" gets once you're talking about a platform with tens of millions of users.

The second bill, SB 957 from state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, takes a wider swing. It's called the Online Dating Safety and Transparency Act, and instead of focusing narrowly on background checks, it would push platforms toward broader accountability — including filing an annual safety report detailing compliance and user-protection efforts, with a $20,000 penalty for companies that don't meet the bill's requirements. Pérez frames it as catching the industry up to how big it's actually gotten: nearly one-third of American adults have used an online dating service, she notes, while the safety infrastructure behind these apps hasn't kept pace. Her office argues the goal is to make sure companies take responsibility for user safety instead of leaving people to fend for themselves.

California isn't acting in a vacuum. At the federal level, the House already unanimously passed Rep. David Valadao's Online Dating Safety Act, H.R. 6125, though that bill has moved much more slowly through the Senate. And privacy advocates are pushing on a parallel track — the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been arguing that dating apps also need comprehensive consumer privacy legislation to limit data collection at its source, separate from the criminal-background question entirely.

None of these bills are law yet, and Menjivar's office has already signaled the final version of SB 1390 will look different from what cleared committee. But the direction is clear: regulators are done treating "we can't be held responsible for what our users do" as a satisfying answer from an industry that facilitates millions of in-person meetings between strangers every year.

Worth noting — this legislative push is entirely about data dating companies hold and choose (or fail) to act on. It has nothing to do with the kind of data you can already pull yourself: your own match history, your own reply patterns, your own activity over time. That's the data export Tinder and Hinge already hand back to you if you ask for it, and it's the raw material RizzStats turns into a match rate, a reply rate, and a Rizz Score at /upload — no background check required, because it's already your own information.