Meghan Voll

Meghan Voll

Relations Not Relationships: Connecting Value and Values on Mobile Dating Apps

Dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, or Coffee Meets Bagel transform our personal details-- names, hobbies, or preferences-- into data points that drive their business models. My research explores how these platforms act as both communicative medium and mediators of exchange, linking user interactions to monetization strategies. By analyzing app designs and user experiences, I uncover how intimate behaviours are increasingly shaped by algorithms and economic incentives. This study sheds light on the evolving nature of relationships in a data-driven society. My research is informed by theories in political economy that reveal insight into how profit shapes human behaviour, which in turn shapes values. My research focuses on mapping exchanges of data between users of mobile dating apps, third parties, and parent companies. Mapping these exchanges will reveal the extent to which the pursuit of relationships takes place through data relations that are within control of the mobile dating apps, not users.

Meghan Voll
PhD candidate, Media Studies
Faculty of Information & Media Studies - Western University

Supervisor
Dr. Joanna Redden

Meghan Voll is a podcaster, data harms researcher, and Ph.D. candidate at Western University. Her research investigates how mobile dating applications like Tinder, Hinge, or Coffee Meets Bagel profit off users’ data, and how this business model affects design to shape behaviours, attitudes, and values about dating and intimacy. By mapping the exchanges of data between pertinent actors in the mobile dating economy like platforms, third parties, and users using quantitative and qualitative methodologies, Meghan believes that she can explain the ever-present and unclear relation between economics and relationships. Ultimately, she hopes that her research can address the need to curate processes and language to identify and investigate the ways that the economic imperatives of companies influence social life to eventually hold said actors accountable. With the emerging ubiquity of new technologies like artificial intelligence, loss of control over personal data, and unclear monetization of that data by digital platforms, Meghan contends that the first step to redress is understanding how profit drives everyday life, including how and what we come to value. Meghan is also a member of the Starling Centre, where she assists with research on data harms, aging, and uses her background in social media marketing and podcast production to develop educational resources as a form of knowledge translation. Meghan has authored one article in the University of Toronto’s iJournal, and contributed to CBC columnist episodes regarding her current Ph.D. research.

Meghan's research is highlighted in episode 526 of GradCast, the official podcast of the Society of Graduate Students at Western University.

You can connect with Meghan on LinkedIn, on X, via email, or her FIMS profile page.

View Meghan's work as it appears in the Inspiring Minds Digital Collection.