Enhancing User Privacy Through Ephemeral Sharing Design: Experimental Evidence from Online Dating.

This article focuses on addressing the cold-start problem in online dating platforms by introducing and evaluating a privacy-enhancing design called ephemeral sharing, which allows users to share personal photos that disappear shortly after being viewed. A large-scale randomized field experiment involving over 70,000 users on an East Asian dating platform demonstrated that ephemeral sharing significantly increases users’ disclosure of personal photos—especially those showing human faces—leading to more matches and higher postmatch conversational engagement. The study found that these effects are primarily driven by reduced social privacy concerns related to data collection, dissemination, and identity abuse, with stronger impacts among privacy-sensitive users. Alternative explanations such as novelty effects, changes in photo content, or shifts in user behavior were ruled out, highlighting ephemeral sharing as an effective mechanism to balance privacy protection with voluntary personal information disclosure in online dating.