Social media is useful for a lot of things. You can find a job, reconnect with old friends or lost loves, and stay in touch with family. And with Facebook, you can do all of these things plus play FarmVille and stalk your exes. But now a new app has added another level of functionality to the world’s largest social network – hooking up.
Bang With Friends (I’m really hating on that name right now!) was developed to -as the website’s homepage puts it – “Anonymously find friends who are down for the night”. The app promises to be completely private and discreet until both friends are “down to bang”. And from there, it gets even worse.
When you click the ‘How It Works’ link, you’re taken to a page with a four-step process that has accompanying illustration demonstrating how to put on a condom. You sign in to the app with Facebook, pick which of your friends you’d like to…well, you know. Only friends that have also installed the app and indicated that they are up for some NSA fun are alerted to your request. You send a private message to your intended and if they’re interested…well, you know what comes next.
The three creators of the app, who wish to remain anonymous for now, say the app’s intended audience is people in their twenties, mainly college students and recent college graduates. They feel that consenting adults should be able to cut through the middleman and get straight to the point if sex is all they want. And it appears that some folks out there agree – as of yesterday, the developers reported they were signing up five users per minute and the app has only been out for four days. Some research may support the popularity of this concept as well. According to one study, as many as 66% of college students admitted to hooking up at some point.
While I don’t necessarily have a problem with the idea of consenting adults hooking up this way, I do have a problem with this app. As of right now, there are no controls in place to prevent minors from signing in. I signed in (for research purposes only!) and there was no mention of age at all. The app only asks for your contact info and relationship status to join. There are way too many underage Facebook users that may have lied about their age when they signed up for this to be okay. I think some sort of age verification needs to be put in place for obvious safety reasons.
If you are over 18 and thinking about using Bang With Friends, just make sure you change the privacy setting where it asks you ‘Who can see posts this app makes for you on your Facebook timeline?’ to “Only Me.” Maybe I’m just not as sexually liberated as the next chick because this is definitely not something I can co-sign, but I’m all about to each his own when it comes to what adults do behind closed doors. So I’d like to know, will you be downloading this app soon?
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