A California Senate committee voted to advance a bill that would require dating platforms to flag users with violent or sexual criminal histories, setting up a fight over privacy that’s already fracturing the Democratic majority.
Sen. Caroline Menjivar, a Van Nuys Democrat, authored the measure. It cleared the Senate public safety committee on the strength of four Democratic votes, enough to move forward despite two no votes. The bill would force online dating services operating in California to run background checks on every user and place a visible marker on profiles belonging to registered sex offenders or anyone convicted of a violent felony, domestic violence, assault, or a hate crime.
Menjivar didn’t flinch at the “scarlet letter” label critics have attached to the proposal. “Dating apps have not provided an adequate level of safety for their users,” she said at the committee hearing. She grounded the argument in a 2019 Columbia Journalism Investigations survey that found more than a third of women polled reported being sexually assaulted or raped by someone they met through a dating app.
She also cited a more recent case: a woman who was murdered and her body set on fire after meeting a man through a dating app. “Those are the incidents we’re looking to prevent,” Menjivar said.
The opposition that emerged wasn’t coming only from the expected side of the aisle. Sen. Scott Wiener of San Francisco broke with his Democratic colleagues and voted no, warning the bill could produce “significant unintended consequences in terms of people’s privacy.” Republican Sen. Kelly Seyarto of Murrieta also opposed it, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database. Their votes weren’t enough to kill the measure in committee, but they signal the harder battles ahead.
The privacy objections aren’t abstract. Jose Torres, a deputy executive director for the industry group TechNet, argued that implementing the background check requirement would compel dating platforms to harvest far more personal data from users than they currently collect. The reasoning: to avoid misidentifying someone before flagging their profile, a platform would need to confirm identity with a degree of certainty that demands substantial data collection. That process could expose users to new risks rather than reducing them.
It’s a tension Menjivar hasn’t dismissed. She told committee members they’re “going to see a dramatically different bill” by the time it reaches the privacy committee. She plans amendments targeting which crime categories would actually trigger a flag and how platforms would realistically build out background check infrastructure.
What won’t change, at least in her framing, is the core premise. The platforms have had years to address this problem on their own and haven’t. CalMatters has reported on how these services repeatedly failed to act on warning signs, and a prior investigation by The Markup documented cases where people accused of sexual violence stayed on dating apps even after victims reported them directly to the companies.
That history shapes why Menjivar’s bill finds traction even among colleagues who have doubts. Dating app safety isn’t a new issue. The 2019 Columbia Journalism Investigations data put numbers on what many users already knew anecdotally, and the platforms’ response since then hasn’t satisfied lawmakers watching incident reports pile up.
Wiener’s no vote carries particular weight here. He’s not a reflexive opponent of consumer protection legislation, and his concern about privacy consequences isn’t a throwaway objection. The San Francisco Democrat has built a record on both tech policy and civil liberties. When he says a bill might do unintended harm, that’s the kind of dissent that can reshape a measure between committees.
Seyarto’s opposition is less surprising given his Murrieta district and Republican affiliation, but it reinforces that the bill doesn’t have a clean partisan path to passage. Four Democratic votes got it through public safety. The privacy committee is a different room with different priorities.
Menjivar knows that. The promised amendments are her acknowledgment that the version that cleared the first committee won’t be the version that survives the full process. What she’s betting on is that the underlying facts, women being assaulted and killed after meeting strangers through apps that took no steps to screen those strangers, are more politically durable than the industry’s objections.
She’s probably right about the politics. Whether the amended bill can resolve the genuine tension between safety mandates and data minimization is a harder question, and one she’ll have to answer before Sacramento’s done with this fight.