[clusterfish]

I'd say yes in principle, because the cost of providing insurance is mostly the cost of risk which objectively and significantly correlates with age. Same for health insurance for example. Taking more profit off younger drivers would still be wrong though imo.

If the underlying cost of the service is legitimately and significantly affected by age, sure, charge accordingly. Tinder's case seems different.

The examples above are about age because any rules about age at least apply more or less consistently to all people as people age over time. I'm not saying that doing the same kind of pricing by other personal traits such as race or gender or eye color would be ok, just so that we're clear.

[CamelCaseName]

I disagree that it costs Tinder the same amount for all users, regardless of age.

Consider their COGS to be user acquisition costs. Serve too many unattractive people and those costs go up as people leave the platform.

With the amount of data they have, I'm sure you could reliably estimate the cost of any given profiles being shown to any other given profile.

This could be used to determine who profiles are shown to, and how often. One implication is that attractive but dead accounts will be shown more often to unattractive but highly active accounts. Another is that unattractive but highly active accounts must be charged more to maintain the same margins.

I am equivocating attractiveness with age here, but presumably there would be too much public outcry if they charged by attractiveness alone, so they my guess is they use age as a proxy.

[clusterfish]

The age as a proxy for attractiveness issue is better solved by matching algorithms that take age difference into account. I'd be surprised if they didn't do this already.

And tbh the whole attractiveness argument smells a lot like how black people were considered unattractive customers that would make it harder to sell to white customers in real estate transactions in 1950s America.

It's not unreasonable that marketing a fair platform would cost more than a discriminatory one, just as it's not unreasonable that e.g. mitigating pollution at a factory costs money.

Regulations should address such things to level the playing field of course, but shit companies trying to sneak in practices like this should be condemned.