Zoe Schiffer | Vox

A pivot from tech to empowerment at bra startup ThirdLove

2019-11-20T15:11:57-05:00

Marketing images for ThirdLove feature models of many shapes and races. | Sarah Lawrence for Vox

Convincing 100 women to show up at a warehouse and take photos of their chests is no easy feat. Convincing them through a Craigslist ad is nearly impossible. But that’s what lingerie company ThirdLove did in 2013 while developing a proprietary app that was designed to predict better bra sizes.

“The app was problematic, to say the least,” said a former engineer we’ll call Ben. “It basically only worked if the photos were good.” When people tried out the at-home instructions exactly — take two pictures in front of a full-length mirror in good lighting while wearing a tight tank top, making sure the phone is at waist-height — the results were reliably accurate. But getting people to do that was difficult.

“The app was problematic, to say the least”

Then there was the matter of data security. Co-CEO David Spector told Inc the company never “recorded” people’s images, but no one was clear on what that meant. Once the photos were submitted via the app, where did they go?

After securing $8 million in funding, ThirdLove stopped developing the app. The technology was complicated, the data difficult to get right. In its wake, the founders doubled down on a narrative that would help set them apart in the competitive but old-school lingerie market: diversity and female empowerment.

To co-CEO Heidi Zak, these tenets had been there all along. “We set out to build a brand for all women of all sizes,” she told Vox. “Look at what we’ve done in the past year or two” — the company has featured diverse models in almost all of its recent marketing campaigns — “We wouldn’t do all these things if that wasn’t core to who we are.”

Many employees aren’t buying it. “It’s all about the money,” said a member of the marketing team we’ll call Liz. Interviews with 10 current and former employees, all of whom asked to remain anonymous, paint a picture of ThirdLove’s transformation, from a data-driven bra brand to a bastion of diversity and inclusion, as one of keen opportunism. The gap between their viewpoint and the founders’ suggests that while the company has succeeded in pushing the lingerie industry to be more inclusive on multiple fronts, it has a long way to go to convince the workers who helped build the brand of its motives.

David Spector and Heidi Zak founded ThirdLove (then called MeCommerce) in 2012 to improve the bra shopping experience. Both came from big tech backgrounds — Zak worked at Google, Spector at the investment firm Sequoia Capital. Early documents list Spector as the CEO and Zak as the president, although today, they co-lead the company and ThirdLove is touted as “female-run.” Their first hire, Ra’el Cohen, continues to head up the design team.

The initial concept was to use computer vision technology to predict more accurate bra sizes. People took photos of themselves using ThirdLove’s proprietary app; computer vision technology then processed the images, and suggested a personalized fit.

To alleviate privacy concerns, Spector was careful to highlight the company’s data sharing policy in interviews, noting privacy was of the “utmost importance” and leading reporters to say the images were “processed without ever being recorded by ThirdLove.”

This was 2013, so a computer vision underwear app was revolutionary. “Want a bra that fits perfect? This billionaire-backed app helps with just your iPhone,” wrote Forbes. “How a NASA scientist helped size my bra,” added Fast Company.

“The story was that the app could size you better than a sales rep in a store, which seemed pretty innovative”

ThirdLove did have a scientist helping them develop the technology. Ara Nefian, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon who contracted at NASA, worked on the apps and nights and weekends, and even he said the technology presented difficulties. “It relied heavily on accurately following the directions and that was a bit complicated,” he explained.

Regardless of the complications, when a woman we’ll call Natalie joined the company in 2014, she was immediately blown away by the technology. “The story was that the app could size you better than a sales rep in a store, which seemed pretty innovative,” she said. “I was really excited about the idea of working at a startup.”

Unlike many of ThirdLove’s recent employees who thought they were joining a female-led company and felt blindsided when they realized Spector’s involvement, Natalie joined for the technology, not the feminist credentials.

Three months into her tenure, however, she was told they were abandoning the app. Computer vision “was just a buzzword,” she realized, even though the tech stayed on the App Store. When she began to ask questions (How would they know people’s sizes? What was going to happen to all the data?), she was told not to worry — the company had stopped using data from the photos anyway.

The reality was slightly more complicated. By late 2014, Nefian had stopped working on the app, and the technology quickly went defunct. It had been finicky when he was involved. Without him, it was almost unusable.

Privacy was also a concern. Women were writing in asking where their photos were going, especially since some had included their faces in the pictures. Employees didn’t know how to respond, but it was clear the app was “freaking people out,” Ben said. Were the photos stored by ThirdLove? The employees themselves still aren’t sure today; the company vehemently denies the photos “were ever stored on any kind of server of any kind,” or even on a “camera roll.”

Nevertheless, ThirdLove began asking users questions about people’s current bra size and fit to get a more reliable read. It was a method that ultimately led to the Fit Finder quiz they now use.

By the end of 2015, the computer vision project had been more or less scrapped, and the media story around ThirdLove began to change. Over the next few years, they became the brand that actually understood breast shape. The company that called out Calvin Klein for sexist ads. The founders that fought for LGBT rights. They called themselves the “antithesis of Victoria’s Secret” and championed inclusivity in terms of both skin tone and size. It was a narrative that would ultimately stick.

ThirdLove’s 2014 marketing bears little resemblance to that of the company people know and love today. Their initial brand persona — the fictional customer they designed their products for — was a heterosexual white woman in her mid-thirties living in Brooklyn, according to three former employees. “She’d meet her co-workers at rooftop bars for drinks after work. It was like Sex and the City,” Liz said. “That’s how ThirdLove started — it wasn’t about being inclusive.”

These employees also recall getting pushback when they tried to use diverse models. “We liked to feature models of color in emails and on the homepage, and they [Spector and Cohen] would just ask us to change them. Sometimes they would say it was because white models sell better,” Liz said.

Four recent employees echoed these claims, saying they have had to re-edit entire campaigns — including one titled “to each her own” that celebrated women’s uniqueness — because there were “too many” models of color. “You’d hear comments from Ra’el Cohen that a model of color ‘looked tough’ or that ‘she looks like she’s going to slap a b,’” a member of the marketing team told us. Zak, who said she has been at every photoshoot produced by the brand, said this was untrue.

Tensions around race and identity are still running high inside ThirdLove. Last month, leaked audio provided to Vox revealed Zak apologized at a company meeting after she and Spector appeared in traditional Mongolian wedding garb on Halloween, offending employees. “As a few of you know, Dave and I were so fortunate this summer to go to Mongolia,” she explained. “We really just wanted to highlight something we felt was really beautiful.” She then asked people to “assume positive intent,” and moved on.

Other aspects of the brand have evolved, employees say. While Natalie remembers Cohen originally not being enthusiastic about offering larger bra sizes — saying “we will never be a plus-size company” on multiple occasions, when asked why ThirdLove didn’t carry larger bra sizes — more recent employees say she has become a strong advocate for bigger bodies. The company now carries over 80 sizes — far more than the typical bra brand — and Zak attributes this in large part to Cohen.

Undisputed is the fact that Spector championed this change. “This is where Dave can be a fascinating human,” Natalie said. While many employees report feeling bullied by his behavior, when he was on their side in an argument, his intensity could be an asset. “Like, he only wanted us to have hot models on our website but then he could be such a pitbull like, ‘This is low-hanging fruit. We have all these women who want this size, we should start carrying it. When are we going to start?’”

This pitbull quality also came out in less than ideal ways. In 2015, when the company launched a free trial program to allow customers to try on bras at home and send them back if they didn’t like the fit, he realized people’s credit cards were getting declined. Some were simply expired, but if customers kept the product, the company didn’t have a good way to recoup the funds, regardless if it was negligence or fraud.

Three employees remember Spector emailing people under a fake name in order to recover the money, claiming that if they didn’t pay up, the company would report them to an agency of online retailers. (No such agency exists.) “If you got too many strikes, you wouldn’t be able to shop online,” Emily recalls Spector telling customers. “It was my first job and I was like, this isn’t normal, right?” In response to this claim, ThirdLove said, “This is a twisted allegation trying to paint something negative which is simply normal business practice.”

Perhaps the company was suffering from the same difficulties as many early-stage startups: things were moving fast, people said things off the cuff, and the founders were zealous in their drive. But employee perception suggests the founders didn’t always take the time to bring the organization’s mission to life inside the company walls, which led to a growing chasm between how executives and their staff saw the brand.

It was around this time that Scott Nathan, a fashion photographer in Los Angeles, was approached about shooting a campaign for a different underwear company, Naja, which had launched in 2014. Naja partnered with women in need to design “underwear with a purpose.” It was founded by the actress Gina Rodriguez and Stanford MBA Catalina Girald.

Naja’s new line was called “Nude for All,” and it boasted an array of bras and underwear for a wide variety of different skin tones. In the photoshoot, Nathan framed 10 “real” women — all with unique jobs and backstories — against a neutral background. The campaign launched in 2016 in subway stations in New York.

Nathan was proud of how the campaign turned out. The images were fresh and showcased Naja’s inclusive values.

A year later, ThirdLove came out with its new campaign, called “The New Naked.” “The industry-favorite brand is launching nude bras for ALL,” Refinery29 announced.

Fashion brands often borrow each other’s concepts and draw inspiration from one another. But to Nathan, ThirdLove’s images were too close to his own. “They completely jacked Naja’s campaign,” he opined. “They basically just copied the whole concept.”

Naja was hardly the first company to sell bras for different skin tones; still, ThirdLove employees felt the brand was jumping on a bandwagon in order to beat out a competitor. “It’s strange because originally it was really hard to get them to commit to an authentic image,” recalled Emily. “It was all very skinny neutral women — none of that girl power feeling they are preaching today.”

To ThirdLove’s early employees, watching the company transform from a tech-focused brand to an industry leader in female empowerment has been surreal. Many feel validated that the company now uses diverse models and offers a wide range of sizes, but the change also feels inauthentic. “They’re just opportunistic,” Liz said.

Zak remains steadfast in her belief that the narrative shared by these employees is wrong. “We’ve always been a brand that’s been for all women,” she said, “from the very beginning of the company.”

Sign up for The Goods’ newsletter. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

ThirdLove says it’s by women, for women. But women who’ve worked there disagree.

2021-05-17T10:21:33-04:00

Turmoil and “bullying” at bra startup ThirdLove led much of the team managing the company’s image to quit in 2018. | Shanee Benjamin for Vox

The fiercely worded letter ran as a full-page ad in the New York Times on Sunday, November 18, and took direct aim at Victoria’s Secret. “I was appalled when I saw the demeaning comments about women your Chief Marketing Officer, Ed Razek, made to Vogue last week,” it began. “How in 2018 can the CMO of any public company — let alone one that claims to be for women — make such shocking, derogatory statements?” It was signed by Heidi Zak, co-founder and co-CEO of ThirdLove, a direct-to-consumer bra company and Victoria’s Secret competitor.

Razek had indeed made appalling comments in Vogue the week before — among them, an out-of-touch excuse for the brand’s outdated beauty standards (“We attempted to do a television special for plus-sizes. No one had any interest in it.”) and a direct attack on the young bra startup (“We’re nobody’s third love, we’re their first love”). The comments confirmed what many people had long suspected: Victoria’s Secret, a company synonymous with long legs and six-pack abs, did not represent most modern women.

It was the perfect opportunity for ThirdLove to swoop in as the anti-Victoria’s Secret, and the fledgling bra startup did just that. “Haven’t we moved beyond outdated ideas of femininity and gender roles?” Zak asked in the ad, her tone oscillating between rage and disbelief. “Let’s listen to women. Let’s respect their intelligence. Let’s exceed their expectations.” Then, in case it wasn’t already clear, she spelled it out: “ThirdLove is the antithesis of Victoria’s Secret.” The entire campaign seemed designed to show how woke, how feminist, how very different ThirdLove was from traditional bra makers — and it worked.

“ThirdLove is the antithesis of Victoria’s Secret”

From the outside, ThirdLove appears to be the ideal millennial brand. Its models aren’t all skinny and white; its sizing supports many body types; it emphasizes customer service and publishes blogs about the women who design and build its garments. “By women, for women” is one of its go-to battle cries. ThirdLove has become a media darling.

“A New Vision of Lingerie: Men Not Required,” proclaimed a New York Times article featuring ThirdLove. “Women are no longer buying the marketing fantasy,” added a columnist in Canada’s largest paper in an article about the recent “explosion of disruptor brands seeing enormous growth by creating products and services that are genuinely for women by women.”

Many women saw ThirdLove’s marketing and believed it was a “different” type of startup. Several employees who joined in recent years said they did so because they believed ThirdLove was a female-run company with an important mission and an empowering environment. When they arrived, they were surprised to find Zak’s husband and co-CEO, David Spector, highly involved in their day-to-day work, with a management style described as “condescending” and “bullying.” This about-face was compounded by company norms — don’t negotiate your salary, don’t leave before 6 pm, don’t work from home, don’t skip a happy hour — that felt out of sync with the brand’s external image.

Interviews with 10 current and former employees, all of whom asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, suggest tensions reached a breaking point in 2018 when ThirdLove waged a public war against Victoria’s Secret — a war many suggest Spector orchestrated. ThirdLove and Spector have declined to comment on the specifics of these allegations. The co-CEO’s behavior during this period, described as intimidating and dismissive, precipitated the exodus of the two teams managing ThirdLove’s image: the brand team and the brand marketing team. Now, an employee says, “People are warned against disagreeing with him publicly ‘cause it’s like, look what happened to the brand team.”

A mission to disrupt the bra industry

Zak and Spector founded ThirdLove in 2013 after leaving their jobs at Google and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, respectively. The idea struck while Zak was shopping for a holiday party and found herself at a mall, immersed in the bright lights and loud music of Victoria’s Secret. “I walked out of the store with a bra that didn’t really fit, and I had that pink-striped bag in my hand and I took it and stuffed it into my backpack because I was embarrassed to be shopping there,” she said during an interview for this story.

Zak and Spector set out to build a better bra, a better brand, and, most of all, a better shopping experience for women all over the world. They tapped respected lingerie designer Ra’el Cohen to be their chief creative officer and first hire.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Thirdlove (@thirdlove)

Six years, 350 employees, and $68.6 million in funding later, what they’ve built threatens to disrupt the entire bra industry. Among other innovations, Zak and Spector use data and machine learning to predict better sizes and conduct most of their business online (they recently opened their first retail store in New York). The company’s Instagram feed features artistic drawings of boobs and diverse, attractive models. The website boasts feminist slogans like “To each, her own” and “See, our shapes don’t define us.”

It’s these progressive messages that helped convince some young women ThirdLove would be a good place to work. Sources say they were attracted to the company’s “by women, for women,” brand ethos, the idea of working for a truly female-oriented Silicon Valley startup. Initially, some say, they weren’t even aware of Spector’s involvement.

That’s likely because, although ThirdLove doesn’t necessarily hide Spector, they do make him less visible than Zak and Cohen. Click on the “Our Story” page on ThirdLove’s website and you’ll see a large photo of Zak and Cohen alongside a heartwarming origin story. Spector isn’t mentioned anywhere.

Nor is he prominent in the media. A Fast Company article titled “Victoria’s Secret threw shade at ThirdLove, and CEO Heidi Zak had the perfect response” described Zak as the founder without mentioning Spector at all. Another on CNBC titled “Google alum turned start-up CEO” profiled Zak’s many accomplishments and also left Spector out. Search for “David Spector” and “ThirdLove” online, and you’ll find about 2,600 results. But search “Heidi Zak” and “ThirdLove” and you’ll see almost 20,000.

“It was pitched like a women-for-women company,” a source we’ll call Kira explained. During the hiring process, she received a text from her former manager saying, “‘Hey, a guy named Dave Spector reached out to talk about you and your experience, he told me not to tell, but of course I’m going to.” She assumed Spector was just “the guy doing referrals.”

When she received the job offer, however, Kira was disappointed to see a surprisingly low salary offer and limited benefits package. When she tried to negotiate, the recruiter told her ThirdLove didn’t do that. “At a by women, for women company, I was kind of bummed out that they didn’t expect me to come in and negotiate,” she said. “They try to make you feel greedy,” a coworker we’ll call Lauren added. ThirdLove has disputed the claim that they do not let people negotiate.

But even if they did, many companies discourage negotiating explicitly because women are less likely to do so and the system can unfairly favor men. That’s what Ellen Pao did during her short stint as Reddit CEO.

ThirdLove’s practice of not negotiating salaries felt less benevolent when paired with below-market-rate salaries. Five sources say they received offers far below what they felt they were worth but they accepted because they believed in the company mission. These feelings are echoed in ThirdLove’s reviews on Glassdoor, where many people mention feeling underpaid. One such review, titled “Meh,” says simply: “don’t get paid enough for the amount of work I do.” Another, titled “Toxic culture,” says: “Compensation is low across the board.”

“At a by women, for women company, I was kind of bummed out that they didn’t expect me to come in and negotiate”

On some teams, leaving before 6 pm was frowned upon, and skipping a company happy hour was known to elicit strongly worded emails from Spector. For years, the company offered six weeks of maternity leave, which is the California minimum (it’s since been increased to four months).

New employees get 15 days of accrued paid time off a year, including sick days. If they take time off before it has accrued, they’re often asked to sign a waiver saying they’ll pay the company back if they leave before making up the time.

Such policies, while not abnormal for a small company, can disadvantage working mothers. “When long maternity leave and flexible work schedules are provided by an employer, women are more likely to stay with a company, grow in their positions and be strong contributors to the organization,” wrote Roxana Maddahi in Forbes.

Until mid-2018, the company also didn’t have an official HR team, although a spokesperson clarified there have been “teammates performing Human Resources jobs at ThirdLove since 2015.”

“The problem with ThirdLove is that they keep saying they’re a startup, and they use the term startup as an excuse like ‘we’re not gonna give you competitive salaries, you’re gonna be on the grind, but it’s all about this mission and if you believe in the mission, the company will be successful and then you’ll be successful.’ But ThirdLove is not a startup,” a source said.

Nevertheless, new hires came in with high hopes of making an impact on women’s lives and a few red flags weren’t going to stop them. “The first three weeks I was pretty optimistic,” Kira said. “I was like, okay, there’s some low-hanging fruit here, if they just released a slightly more flexible work policy and grew the HR team, this could work.”

“None of us really agreed with it from the beginning”

In October 2018, ThirdLove decided to partner with Australian model Robyn Lawley to urge people to boycott the annual Victoria’s Secret fashion show in protest of its unrealistic beauty standards. In a blog post announcing the move, the company promised to donate one bra to a woman in need for every Instagram post that featured the hashtag #WeAreAllAngels.

Kira, Lauren, and multiple other coworkers said they believed in the message but felt uncomfortable with the combative tone. “The perception was that it was picking a fight,” Lauren said. “None of us really agreed with it from the beginning.” Plus, the company had just come out with another campaign celebrating women’s individuality with the slogan “To each, her own.” “It was like ‘what if a woman wants to be in the show or watch it, why are we telling them what to do?’” a source we’ll call Kate said.

Around the same time, Kira told a consultant at the company, a leadership coach who worked closely with Spector, that she wanted to meet with the executive: “Almost verbatim she said ‘Dave is a deeply insecure man, make sure you pat his ego throughout your conversation and that you don’t surprise him. Talk about things he knows about.’” The consultant could not be reached for comment. As of publication, ThirdLove and Spector had not responded to requests for comment on this matter; we will update if we do receive a response.

Kira left the conversation worried, but felt sure the tension would die down once the fashion show was over. Within a month the Vogue article came out with the barb from the Victoria’s Secret executive, “we’re nobody’s third love, we’re their first love,” and ThirdLove’s campaign escalated even further.

The brand team published a response — an Instagram post highlighting the article along with a carefully worded caption — but Spector felt it wasn’t strong enough. According to multiple sources from the team, he ordered them to take down the post despite the traction it was getting (it allegedly received 100 comments in the first 30 minutes) then dictated a new one he felt better represented the brand.

“It was supposed to be this empowering letter from a female CEO but Dave rewrote it”

When it came time to write the letter that would eventually run as an ad in the New York Times, Spector was similarly involved. “It was supposed to be this empowering letter from a female CEO but Dave rewrote it. Heidi gave him credit for it in a company meeting,” Lauren said. One woman remembers turning to her teammate, saying: “In a by women, for women company, it’s pretty ironic that we’re all tiptoeing around a man.”

After that, every social media post had to be pre-approved by the leadership team, which now seemed to mean only Spector. “He definitely would go fishing for random things, find some minute detail and blow up about that,” a former employee told us. People remember him standing over employees’ shoulders, dictating colors, images, and even fonts for social media posts and advertisements.

He also became increasingly obsessed with Victoria’s Secret. “They’re such a messed-up company, run by a man, they’re so old school,” an employee remembers him ranting. Spector’s personal Instagram account also began to make people uncomfortable with Stories and images berating the larger brand and calling out executives for blocking him.

“People were getting bullied,” Lauren added. Multiple times, an employee who worked at the front desk said Spector walked into the office with a small piece of trash and reprimanded her for not cleaning up the street outside. “When you’re in the position of being reprimanded by the CEO as a pretty low-level worker, it’s never a good feeling,” the employee said. As of publication, ThirdLove and Spector had not responded to requests for comment on this matter; we will update if we do receive a response.

A few weeks after the Vogue article came out, Zak, Spector, Cohen, and their families flew to Mexico together for the Thanksgiving holiday. The rest of the company was expected to work the day before and after Thanksgiving unless they wanted to use their limited paid time off.

“The day after Thanksgiving I said to my coworker, ‘I’m better than this, this is not my life,’” Kira said. Her coworkers wanted to help but were struggling to cope as well. “There was a day one girl cried at 11 am and 4 pm and it was just like, you can’t cry twice a day at work,” Kira added. Soon, both women decided to leave.

Kate was also reaching a breaking point. “I thought this was normal, but it’s not normal to not take paid time off, it’s not normal to get text messages at midnight,” she said, noting that some of these texts came from Spector, who was a frequent “night worker.” Eventually, she also decided to quit.

By May of 2019, most of the members of the brand and brand marketing teams had left the company. Some were asked to sign post-employment non-disclosure agreements, barring them from speaking publicly about the company for at least a year.

Overall, people felt disappointed by Spector’s behavior. “It started to feel real hypocritical, the fact that he points fingers at a company being led by a man when it was so clear that we were being led by a man,” a former employee said. ThirdLove and Spector declined to comment on this accusation but through their legal representation did emphasize that it is Zak and not Spector who is truly running the company.

“It’s not his fault he’s a man.”

Not every team at ThirdLove has had this experience; the data, engineering, and design teams all seem happy with how Zak and Spector run the organization and are insulated from the micromanagement. A former technical executive said he doesn’t understand people’s complaints. “I don’t think there’s a big problem there,” he added. “On Glassdoor people are like ‘Dave is a man’ and all this kind of stuff, but it’s not his fault he’s a man.”

Clare Karunawardhane, senior director of design and development, said she appreciates the leadership and company culture at ThirdLove and feels really supported as a working mother at the company. “Recently, it was my son’s first day of pre-K and school starts at 9 am. I told them I’m gonna come in later and they were like, ‘No problem.’ It was perfectly fine,” she explained.

Megan Cartwright, director of data science, agreed. “My team all leave around 5 pm,” she said. “I’m working with really amazing female leadership and my team is almost all women. I actually have to really try to recruit men.”

“The difference in treatment for people in a numbers-based environment and those in more creative roles is wild”

But others say they see a large difference in how technical and creative teams are managed. “The difference in treatment for people in a numbers-based environment and those in more creative roles is wild,” a former employee said. “There was a lot that felt really directly bad, and kind of abusive, when I was there,” she added. “That’s a pretty big word so I don’t want to say that lightly, but it’s not a good working environment.”

Another source said she saw both sides. “I knew a lot of people who felt it was really toxic,” she said. “I would bounce back in between because I was one of the lucky ones who joined at the right time and was on the right team so it was actually really good for my career.”

But this source also knew people felt underpaid and overworked. “A lot of people felt a bit exploited,” she said, adding that even things that were supposed to be fun, like company happy hours, could end up being stressful. “A lot of stuff felt kind of phony, like they wanted it to be a loving, warm company but it honestly felt like mandatory fun. There was this whole thing that if you didn’t go to happy hours you could get in trouble. You knew you had to be there.”

The gap between ThirdLove’s external image and its internal company culture felt crushing to many female employees. They thought they were joining a movement: a female-led, female-oriented startup with an important global mission.

When they met Spector, they quickly realized this vision wasn’t the whole story. Many said he wasn’t interested in helping them grow or hearing what they had to say. They reported feeling bullied and even traumatized. Most of all, sources said, his behavior and level of involvement felt hypocritical given the company’s brand ethos.

“I would absolutely call ThirdLove’s culture toxic, and I would call it top-down toxic,” a former employee said. “New hires feel like they’re joining a movement they believe in and have a really hard experience when they realize that’s an illusion.”

Following publication, ThirdLove contacted Vox to clarify certain statements in this article. Vox has updated the article to reflect ThirdLove’s clarifications.

Sign up for The Goods’ newsletter. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

How to erase your personal information from the internet (it’s not impossible!)

2020-01-14T10:37:30-05:00

The internet knows my age and home address. It knows how much I make and what I do for work. It knows when I last voted (2018!) and who I voted for (RIP). Recently, I got married in a supposedly secret ceremony at city hall. The internet found out before my mother.

I didn’t willingly share this information, but I’m not at all surprised that it’s online. Personal data — the searches, photos, purchases, locations, and Facebook messages that populate digital identities and fuel the attention economy — is the internet’s favorite currency. It’s also becoming impossible to control.

That’s partly because the US lacks substantial data-privacy legislation. You’re not really protected against rampant data brokering on “background check” sites like Whitepages and BeenVerified, which scrape public records and compile information — like your home address and phone number — and make them painfully visible.

And yes, when we sign up for Instagram or order our dinners on Caviar, we might technically be voluntarily signing away our rights, but what other choice do we have? Privacy policies are tailor-made to obscure their murky contents, and few of us take the time to read the terms of service. Plus, “if you want complete control — if you want to opt-out, you’re going to lead a very limited life,” says Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Recently, data privacy landed in the spotlight when Russia-based photo-editing app Faceapp admitted that it was collecting metadata on user photos. The story resulted in Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) calling for an FBI probe, but such practices are common in Silicon Valley.

Social media is, after all, just a small piece of the data puzzle. “We really have two forms of digital selves,” explains Jen King, director of privacy at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. “One is basically all the data that companies collect on us — that’s what you find in the hands of data brokers. The other is the one you construct, the one we curate and spend a lot of time trying to control. The two things overlap, but one is controlled by you and the other is not.”

As New York Times tech columnist Brian X. Chen recently discovered, even something as innocuous as a phone number can be used to reveal where you live, who you’re related to, and whether or not you’ve ever been arrested. This information can also be used to breeze past security questions used to secure online accounts.

This is bad — very bad — for physical safety. In 2014, video game designer Zoe Quinn was forced to move out of her house when trolls began posting photos of her apartment alongside graphic death threats — part of a harassment campaign known as Gamergate. “Your typical middle-class white guy living in Santa Clara might think, ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen to me?’ But vulnerable populations,” such as women and minorities, Galperin says, “are always the canaries in the coal mine.”

“People assume privacy is about how you communicate to another individual. They forget it also involves the extent to which you’re being tracked and surveilled online,” adds King. “In the US right now, I don’t know if there’s a good way to opt out. It’s really, really tough. But I haven’t given up hope that there will be federal-level change.”

Given the scale of the problem and the difficulty of staying completely offline, digital privacy is more important than ever before. How can you get it back? I posed the question to security researchers, reputation managers, and privacy advocates. Here’s their best advice for trying to erase yourself — either a little or a lot — from the internet.

Start with a quick Google search

Before you can get a handle on digital privacy, you first have to understand what is out there. Start by Googling yourself with your browser in private or “incognito” mode — which prevents some tracking and autofilling from your own internet use — and look for social media profiles and data brokers. (Google and its popular Chrome browser hold a wealth of data, too.) This will allow you to see what a stranger would find if they began looking for your information online. For most of us, social media profiles populate the first few search results on Google.

Next, find the data brokers. These companies scrape information from public records and compile it into a database. Then, as the name might suggest, they sell it. (This is technically legal, though shady.) Oftentimes, they’ll have things like your birthday, phone number, home address, salary, as well as names of neighbors and family members. This information can be used to hack into other online accounts by giving people hints on how you might answer security questions.

Popular brokers include Spokeo, Intelius, BeenVerified, Whitepages, MyLife, and Radaris, but you can find many others on privacy company and reputation management firm Abine’s free library.

This audit won’t be comprehensive. Rob Shavell, Abine’s chief executive, says that when his company was founded in 2012, employees removed about 1,000 pieces of information per customer over a two-year period. Today, that number has reached 1,900. This amount of information is too much for the average person to comprehend or completely erase — but you can certainly make it harder for others to find by getting it off common websites.

Decide how private you want to be

The concept of privacy is personal — information one person leaves public might make another uneasy. “Some people are comfortable having their photos up online, but others are incredibly uncomfortable with the notion that strangers can see what they look like or know their phone number,” says Galperin. “Everybody’s threat model is a little different.”

Deciding what data you want to protect and who you want to protect it from helps to narrow down the scope of your privacy project. For me, getting my home address, high school photos, names of family members, and income off the internet felt like a good place to start.

Once you’ve decided how private you want to get …

Here’s what to do if you’re not ready to delete your Instagram, but you still want to protect your privacy

Data brokers are legally required to delete your data if you tell them to do so. But each one has a different process, so you’ll need to go through them individually.

On WhitePages, simply enter the URL to your “profile” (i.e. dossier) here, then go through the steps as prompted. Check back in a few weeks to make sure your data is really gone. Repeat for all the data brokers that show up on the first three pages of Google. If this process sounds overly taxing and you happen to have $129 lying around, Abine has a paid service called DeleteMe.

Next, consider setting your social media profiles to private. This will make it harder for strangers (future bosses, exes, the list goes on …) to find highly personal information. If you need a public Instagram account (because, say, you’re a photographer) think about creating a separate work account and keeping your personal one private. If that’s too complicated, just stop geo-tagging photos so people can track your every move.

If you’re worried about third parties following you around the internet and hitting you with personalized ads, you might want to install an ad blocker. Most are free — I use one creatively named Ad-Blocker (just tap “install” and it goes right to your browser). There is some debate about how well certain ad blockers work. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also has a free FireFox browser plugin that claims to be more comprehensive.

What to do if you’re ready to go dark on social media

One Facebook scandal away from moving to the woods? Considering applying to graduate school? You’re ready to delete social media. Or at least, some social media. I can’t, because I have the attention span of a bumble bee and need something to look at on the bus. But if it’s your time, here’s how to do it.

On Facebook, the process is nearly the same as deactivating your account, except after 30 days your data will permanently be expunged from the company’s servers (read the instructions here). You can also download your data ahead of time (photos, messages, etc) so you have access to it moving forward. If you’re one of those people who “has to have Facebook” because you “need to remember people’s birthdays,” there’s a tool for that. Once you sign up, it’ll download friend’s birthdays and email you on the right day (as a bonus, this service claims to be very privacy-centric). Obviously, Facebook now owns Instagram (and WhatsApp), so you’ll probably want to delete that too.

King notes that going dark isn’t possible for everyone. “In some ways, it becomes a privileged statement to say you don’t need to be online. A lot of states are providing public assistance online. If you want to apply for any job now, you don’t walk around filling out paper applications.”

What to do when your Google search results are a dumpster fire

If you’ve ever done something unfortunate on the internet (like tweeted an AIDS joke or accidentally posted a naked photo), you might want to bring in the professionals. A host of online reputation management companies like Metal Rabbit and Reputation Defender are there to help you transform your Google search results by creating more flattering content.

I thought this was a joke when I first heard it, but it’s now become common practice. After a scandal, these companies sweep in like Olivia Pope, taking real parts of your biography and expanding them into articles and personal websites to push down the negative content. “If you manage your search results, you put your best foot forward,” says Metal Rabbit founder Bryce Tom. “Humans are just naturally lazy. The more content you put in a centralized location, the easier it is that they’ll see what you want them to see and not see what you don’t.” It’s worth noting these services are pretty expensive.

And finally, what to do if you want to go fully AWOL (good luck with that!)

This is difficult — if not impossible — to do. You’ll need to permanently delete, not just deactivate, all social media. You’ll need to start checking out as a guest when shopping online so companies don’t store your email address (though some will anyway — nothing you can do about that). Next, request that data brokers delete your data, and remind them to delete it every few months so they don’t start sneakily recollecting it.

Surprisingly, there are more than a few risks associated with erasing your online presence. When you delete social media profiles, “you’re creating a void” in Google search results, “and allowing something else to pop into the top 10,” says Tom. If someone publishes information about you in the future, it’ll likely be more easily discoverable. Tom suggests deleting the content from your profiles but keeping them active instead. Less satisfying, sure, but potentially safer.

Finally, if asked for an email or phone number, don’t provide a real one unless you absolutely have to. Using services like Airbnb will become nearly impossible, since no one can verify your identity — but since you’re living in the woods anyway, does it matter?

Zoe Schiffer reports on tech policy and helps publish the Interface, a daily newsletter on social media platforms and democracy, for The Verge.

The life of a white-hat hacker

2019-08-08T09:23:06-04:00

It took the hackers one day to break into the smart lock used to secure people’s front doors. But breaking and entering wasn’t the goal — the hackers wanted access to the “smart hub” that controlled this lock and others like it across the globe. Two days later, they were in.

When Charles Dardaman, a 20-something hacker and video game enthusiast living in Dallas, and his friend Jason Wheeler, an information security expert, opened the hub, they found the admin password hardcoded on its memory card. This was much more valuable than just breaking into the smart lock itself. Smart hubs, like the ones made by the technology company Zipato, control a variety of gadgets from locks to thermostats and security systems. Gaining admin access to the hub was like getting a master key to any home that used Zipato’s tech. “If I’m attacking someone’s network, I view it as either I win and I get in, or I lost,” said Dardaman. This time, he won.

But Dardaman wasn’t after people’s stuff. In fact, he and Wheeler immediately notified Zipato about the breach.

Dardaman and Wheeler are ethical hackers — people who break into systems for a living to help make technology more secure. These “white-hat hackers” differentiate themselves from criminal hackers in that they won’t do anything illegal. Many work for government agencies or corporations, while others operate out of home laboratories, preferring to just hack for fun.

But that doesn’t mean all their hacks are strictly authorized. While Dardaman and Wheeler spend their workdays hacking into companies that have asked them to test their vulnerabilities, they spend their nights and weekends pursuing unofficial “side projects.”

One of those weekend experiments was the Zipato hack, inspired by fellow information security expert Lesley Carhart, who, when she found out her landlord was switching the entire apartment building to smart locks earlier this year, decided to start looking for a new home.

Dardaman and Wheeler hacked into the hub to prove Carhart’s apprehension was well founded. They gave the report to TechCrunch, and the news immediately went viral. “Companies are putting smart home technology out there without security because they don’t think anyone will check,” Dardaman explained.

This type of ethical hacking can have real implications for people’s safety.

In 2015, hackers were able to remotely hijack a Jeep while someone was driving, prompting Chrysler to recall 1.4 million vehicles. Hackers from the white-hat collective Anonymous Calgary Hivemind broke into Nest security cameras last year to warn people about vulnerabilities — scaring homeowners and forcing Nest to reset passwords and encourage users to adopt two-factor verification. Earlier this year, ethical hackers revealed that security vulnerabilities in Medtronic heart implants could allow an attacker to change a patient’s implant settings from as far as 20 feet away. The Food and Drug Administration is currently working with Medtronic to fix the vulnerabilities as a result of the hackers’ report.

These hackers are aware of how most people associate their craft with criminality. “People talk about life hacking or travel hacking and there’s no negative connotation,” said a hacker who goes by wirefall and asked not to be identified by their real name. “But put ‘computer’ with it and it becomes this scary hooded figure. Locksmiths don’t get asked, ‘Why didn’t you get into burglary?’”

But the relationship between ethical hackers and the companies they hack into can be tenuous. While some organizations welcome the knowledge, others see hackers as the enemy and hardly distinguish between white hats and cybercriminals. “For many companies, it’s cheaper to pay a fine than do security right,” wirefall added. Without adequate regulation, some hackers say, media attention and public pressure can be the best way to enforce security.

For Dardaman, criminal hacking was never an option. “I wanted a normal life,” he said. “And a 401(k).”

The summer between high school and college, he started writing cheats for the video game Minecraft and fell in love with the puzzle-solving aspects of legal hacking. By the time he graduated from university with a degree in information technology, he knew he would be an ethical hacker.

Today, Dardaman works at Critical Start, a firm that contracts out ethical hackers to large corporations and banks. The company is part of a growing information security industry that’s working to stem the rising tide of cyberattacks.

The field started to grow in the early 2000s in response to early data breaches and the advent of social media and online retail. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for people to go from criminal hacking into white-hat hacking after being caught by the government. Now people like Dardaman can take ethical hacking courses in school and receive online certifications in cybersecurity.

Most of Dardaman’s contracts run between one and two weeks. Oftentimes, a company won’t tell their security team Dardaman is there, allowing him to move around their networks quietly, observing how things work and finding his way deeper into the system. But the cat-and-mouse game only lasts a few days.

“The goal is by the end of the week that I’m extremely loud,” he added, noting that his final move is typically to gain domain access to the company’s servers to set off alarms on the security team. “If they don’t catch me by the end of the week, they should reassess their security tools.”

In his free time, Dardaman hacks smart home technology — appliances that can be voice-activated or remotely controlled with sensors or an internet connection — because he believes people don’t adequately understand the security risks.

A 2018 hack on a Guardzilla security camera allowed him to gain access to the information stored on user’s devices. (He notes he didn’t actually access the information, because that would be “very illegal.”)

“There’s no better way to protect your system than testing it as an adversary,” said Phillip Wylie, a penetration tester at US Bank and ethical hacking professor at Richland College. “This is the way a nation-state or a hacktivist or cybercriminal will try to break into the system.”

Like Dardaman, Wylie was drawn to mental puzzles, the excitement of breaking into a closed system. Before joining US Bank, he worked as a consultant, doing penetration tests, or authorized cyberattacks, on web apps. Once, he found a serious vulnerability that allowed him to gain access to a client’s core database. “The password was ‘password1,’’ he said. He used a tool called John the Ripper to get inside (it took him all of 30 seconds). “I could add users to that system; I could’ve shut the server down, dumped the database, deleted records …”

But not all hackers are there solely to expose security risks. Jane Manchun Wong, a 23-year-old computer scientist in Hong Kong, spends her free time reverse-engineering apps to find out what features are coming next. “The stuff I find is public information,” Wong said. “It’s hiding inside everyone’s phone. It doesn’t make it illegal to extract it just because it’s hard to find.”

In April, she broke the news that Instagram was going to try hiding “like” counts on photos for certain users. “When I first posted about that, Instagram tried to say, ‘We’re not testing this.’ But the code exists — that’s the bottom line,” she said. Later that month, Instagram announced that it would in fact start to test hiding likes for some users in seven countries.

Still, Wong’s larger goals are the same. When she finds leaked user data in the code, she reports it to the company so it can fix the potential breach. She also does it for fun, saying she enjoys the puzzle-solving aspect.

In an interview with the BBC, Wong explained, “Since I started getting some interest and the companies started monitoring my tweets, more companies have been improving their app security. That is one of my points of doing this … companies will improve their app security so it’s harder to break in.”

Wong’s hacks have indeed garnered significant media attention. When she released the news about Instagram, “almost the entire internet blew up.” Wong noted that companies don’t like what she’s doing, but there’s not much they can do to keep her quiet.

Most white-hat hackers say they are not trying to make companies look bad. Typically, they’ll notify an organization privately and give them about 90 days — a norm promoted by Google’s Project Zero — to patch any security vulnerabilities. “If they respond and fix it, great,” said Dardaman, who abides by this strict ethical code. “If they say they won’t fix it, I release the report early. If they try to drag it out for six months, I’ll just drop it — there’s no reason not to. If it’s a real issue, then you should be able to fix it within that time frame.”

Wong is also willing to work with the companies she hacks. Last year, she found out Facebook was working on a javascript library to make web apps faster. When she began dropping hints about the project on Twitter, a Facebook employee reached out and asked her not to reveal the details since they were planning to announce it the following year — and she complied. In May, she was delighted to find out that they’d released the project open source.

But many hackers say they feel a responsibility to let users know about security flaws. When companies get mad at them for exposing potential vulnerabilities, they question whether the organization is taking security seriously. “If someone finds a vulnerability and reports it and the vendor says they’re going to report them to law enforcement, that’s a problem,” Wylie said, even though these are ultimately empty threats. “You should be happy you got a free pen test.”

In the case of the Zipato smart hub, the company responded shortly after receiving the report, promising to fix the flaws as soon as possible. “They didn’t like to hear from me,” Dardaman said, laughing. “But they fixed it.”

A few weeks later, once that was done, he released the report.

The dating algorithm that gives you just one match

2019-07-11T17:26:47-04:00

The Marriage Pact, an algorithm that removes endless swiping and choice from the online dating experience, went viral at Stanford two years ago. | Javier Zarracina/Vox

Siena Streiber, an English major at Stanford University, wasn’t looking for a husband. But waiting at the cafe, she felt nervous nonetheless. “I remember thinking, at least we’re meeting for coffee and not some fancy dinner,” she said. What had started as a joke — a campus-wide quiz that promised to tell her which Stanford classmate she should marry — had quickly turned into something more. Now there was a person sitting down across from her, and she felt both excited and anxious.

The quiz that had brought them together was part of a multi-year study called the Marriage Pact, created by two Stanford students. Using economic theory and cutting-edge computer science, the Marriage Pact is designed to match people up in stable partnerships.

As Streiber and her date chatted, “It became immediately clear to me why we were a 100 percent match,” she said. They found out they’d both grown up in Los Angeles, had attended nearby high schools, and eventually wanted to work in entertainment. They even had a similar sense of humor.

“It was the excitement of getting paired with a stranger but the possibility of not getting paired with a stranger,” she mused. “I didn’t have to filter myself at all.” Coffee turned into lunch, and the pair decided to skip their afternoon classes to hang out. It almost seemed too good to be true.

In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper wrote a paper on the paradox of choice — the concept that having too many options can lead to decision paralysis. Seventeen years later, two Stanford classmates, Sophia Sterling-Angus and Liam McGregor, landed on a similar concept while taking an economics class on market design. They’d seen how overwhelming choice impacted their classmates’ love lives and felt certain it led to “worse outcomes.”

“Tinder’s huge innovation was that they eliminated rejection, but they introduced massive search costs,” McGregor explained. “People increase their bar because there’s this artificial belief of endless options.”

Sterling-Angus, who was an economics major, and McGregor, who studied computer science, had an idea: What if, rather than presenting people with a limitless array of attractive photos, they radically shrank the dating pool? What if they gave people one match based on core values, rather than many matches based on interests (which can change) or physical attraction (which can fade)?

“There are a lot of superficial things that people prioritize in short-term relationships that kind of work against their search for ‘the one,’” McGregor said. “As you turn that dial and look at five-month, five-year, or five-decade relationships, what matters really, really changes. If you’re spending 50 years with someone, I think you get past their height.”

The pair quickly realized that selling long-term partnership to college students wouldn’t work. So they focused instead on matching people with their perfect “backup plan” — the person they could marry later on if they didn’t meet anyone else.

Remember the Friends episode where Rachel makes Ross promise her that if neither of them are married by the time they’re 40, they’ll settle down and marry each other? That’s what McGregor and Sterling-Angus were after — a sort of romantic safety net that prioritized stability over initial attraction. And while “marriage pacts” have probably long been informally invoked, they’d never been powered by an algorithm.

What started as Sterling-Angus and McGregor’s minor class project quickly became a viral phenomenon on campus. They’ve run the experiment two years in a row, and last year, 7,600 students participated: 4,600 at Stanford, or just over half the undergraduate population, and 3,000 at Oxford, which the creators chose as a second location because Sterling-Angus had studied abroad there.

“There were videos on Snapchat of people freaking out in their freshman dorms, just screaming,” Sterling-Angus said. “Oh, my god, people were running down the halls trying to find their matches,” added McGregor.

Next year the study will be in its third year, and McGregor and Sterling-Angus tentatively plan to launch it at a few more schools including Dartmouth, Princeton, and the University of Southern California. But it’s unclear if the project can scale beyond the bubble of elite college campuses, or if the algorithm, now operating among college students, contains the magic key to a stable marriage.

The idea was hatched during an economics class on market design and matching algorithms in fall 2017. “It was the beginning of the quarter, so we were feeling pretty ambitious,” Sterling-Angus said with a laugh. “We were like, ‘We have so much time, let’s do this.’” While the rest of the students dutifully fulfilled the class requirement of writing a single paper about an algorithm, Sterling-Angus and McGregor decided to design an entire study, hoping to solve one of life’s most complex problems.

The idea was to match people not based solely on similarities (unless that’s what a participant values in a relationship), but on complex compatibility questions. Each person would fill out a detailed survey, and the algorithm would compare their responses to everyone else’s, using a learned compatibility model to assign a “compatibility score.” It then made the best one-to-one pairings possible — giving each person the best match it could — while also doing the same for everyone else.

McGregor and Sterling-Angus read through academic journals and talked to experts to design a survey that could test core companionship values. It had questions like: How much should your future kids get as an allowance? Do you like kinky sex? Do you think you’re smarter than most other people at Stanford? Would you keep a gun in the house?

Then they sent it to every undergraduate at their school. “Listen,” their email read. “Finding a life partner is probably not a priority right now. You hope things will manifest naturally. But years from now, you may realize that most viable boos are already hitched. At that point, it’s less about finding ‘the one’ and more about finding ‘the last one left.’ Take our quiz, and find your marriage pact match here.”

They hoped for 100 responses. Within an hour, they had 1,000. The next day they had 2,500. When they closed the survey a few days later, they had 4,100. “We were really floored,” Sterling-Angus said.

At around 11 pm the following Monday, they sent out the results. Instantly, the campus went wild. Resident assistants texted them saying the freshmen dorms were in chaos, and the Stanford memes Facebook page — where students share campus-specific humor — was awash in Marriage Pact content.

Streiber, the English major who would go on to meet her match for coffee and discover how much they had in common, remembers filling out the survey with friends. Amused at this “very Stanford way” of solving the school’s perpetually “odd dating culture,” she wrote a tongue-in-cheek poem about the experience:

In the following weeks, McGregor and Sterling-Angus began to hear more about the matches. “People were saying they were matched with their exes, with their best friend’s boyfriend,” Sterling-Angus recalled. “Siblings matched, and everyone else was horrified but we were ecstatic because we’re like, ‘It works.’”

A few people started dating their matches, but that was almost beside the point. The flaws they’d seen the first year could be easily fixed — there were simple ways to make sure no one matched with their siblings — but for now, their proof of concept had worked. It already felt like a win.

The Marriage Pact’s focus on core values echoes that of older dating sites like OkCupid, which gives users a list of potential mates with compatibility scores based on a questionnaire. But OkCupid still runs into the issue of presenting people with seemingly infinite options. Meanwhile, newer apps like Tinder and Hinge, which emphasize profile photos, were built for endless swiping, compounding the paradox of choice.

These dating apps are “competing to keep you swiping for as long as possible,” summarized Tristan Harris, the co-founder and director of the Center for Humane Technology. “They get you addicted to getting attention … and try to turn your social life into Las Vegas.”

Some apps have tried to rectify this problem by restricting the supply of potential matches and encouraging people to meet in person as soon as possible. In June, Bumble, an app designed around women making the first move, opened a wine bar in SoHo called Bumble Brew. Two years earlier, they’d opened a pop-up restaurant called Hive. “The lines were out the door,” according to a report by Bloomberg.

While the League, a dating app for people with “high standards,” has no such storefront, it purposely tries to limit the dating supply. “Instead of endless swiping, users receive between three and seven matches a day, and we aim to make them quality potentials that could be your future soulmate,” wrote Amanda Bradford, founder and CEO, in an email. “It’s impossible to predict chemistry and nothing beats meeting in person, so all of the features that we are working on are designed to get people to meet in person as quickly as possible rather than judge a book by its cover,” she added.

But McGregor and Sterling-Angus are doubtful these strategies will ultimately result in sustainable relationships. The Marriage Pact, they argue, doesn’t prioritize user engagement. Its purpose is to actually find you someone you could partner with for life.

“What’s a successful outcome on the apps, a phone number exchange?” McGregor asked. “No, a successful outcome is staying on the app,” Sterling-Angus corrected.

“It’s a hookup and then return.”

Today, the dating app market is an estimated $3 billion industry, and more than half of all single people in the US have tried a dating app at some point. Online dating isn’t going anywhere, however frustrating people find it to be. If the Marriage Pact is able to scale beyond college campuses, it could provide a welcome alternative to the typical swiping experience.

McGregor and Sterling-Angus aren’t sure when that will happen, but they are already well into designing their next study. “We’re not gonna make this good, we’re gonna make this really good,” McGregor said.

Next year, they want to bring the Marriage Pact to more schools, including state schools on the East Coast, using a network of friends and colleagues to determine where it would be most successful. “For now, we operate in pre-filtered communities,” Sterling-Angus said. She knows this is part of their success, since “people are fairly like-minded and have a strong sense of affiliation” at universities.

And after that? Sterling-Angus and McGregor told me they eventually hope to launch the Marriage Pact in “other communities that still have a strong sense of identity” but declined to comment on specifics, saying they hadn’t “finalized that internally” yet. When asked if they could see doing this full time, they said, yes, if the study ever expanded to become a company.

If and when that happens, Sterling-Angus and McGregor will have to contend with the ramifications of taking money from investors who have their own ideas about what “success” means for online dating, and the exponentially messier problem of matching people up in a dating pool outside the college elite.

They’ll also have to answer the question that looms over the Marriage Pact: In the long term, can the algorithm actually lead to happy, lasting relationships? Does it work?

After Streiber graduated from Stanford, she moved back to LA to pursue acting full time. But she hasn’t forgotten about her Marriage Pact match. She told me that after their first coffee date, she followed up with him to try to hang out, but they never seemed to find a time. “I kept going back to our first conversation and being like oh, it went so well, what happened, what changed? But one thing I realized is that for as perfect a match as we were on paper, that doesn’t always translate into real life.”

When we spoke on the phone, Streiber was on her way to an improv show. “It’s summer now, he’s back, and I might be seeing him tonight, in a weird twist of events,” she said.

She texted me the next day: “Just wanted to let you know that the guy never ended up showing last night! Classic.”

The kid from “David After Dentist” is headed to college

2019-09-12T15:03:31-04:00

David felt really weird after having a tooth removed. He was loopy from the medication and, as a 7-year-old, didn’t understand what was happening. “Is this real life?” he asked his dad, David DeVore, who happened to be filming him as they sat in the car about to drive home from the dentist’s office. “Yeah, this is real life,” his dad replied.

“David After Dentist” is what we now call a viral video. David’s father uploaded it to YouTube on a whim one Friday afternoon in 2009, seven months after the video was taken. “I just wanted to share it with friends and family,” he said.

Before the recession, he’d worked in real estate, but now he was a stay-at-home dad. The family — David DeVore, his wife Tessie Guell DeVore, and their two kids, David Jr. and Will — lived in Florida, and while they were still able to make ends meet, times felt decidedly tough. Tessie DeVore worked in the Christian publishing industry and was away on a business trip when David has his tooth removed, so her husband recorded the video for her. He decided to make it public simply because it seemed easier than sharing the link with each family member individually.

So when he checked YouTube the following Sunday, he was stunned. The video had more than 10,000 views. By Wednesday, it had 4 million.

The rest is now internet history. “David After Dentist” became a sensation, and the DeVore family appeared on the Today show, The Tyra Banks Show, and Fox News. And while some people criticized the father’s parenting (“people called me a child abuser and stuff”), he still views the experience as positive. “I would do it all over again in a heartbeat,” he said.

David, now 18 and heading to college, agrees with his dad. “Now that I’m getting older. it’s just cool.” He says it took him a while to even realize he was internet famous, since his friends didn’t realize until they were older. Asked how this realization felt, he shrugs. “Interesting?” he offers, finally. “It was never embarrassing.”

The type of internet fame that David experienced — mostly supportive, humorous, and even sweet — is emblematic of the 2000s. This was the cusp of the social media era, when people regularly posted their earnest feelings on Facebook and being in someone’s Top Eight on MySpace still connoted close friendship. But the online conversation has soured since then, and blowback can be crueler. Now, in the age of doxing, trolls, and brutal Twitter takedowns, is it possible to escape viral fame so unscathed?

An internet golden age

One of the first viral videos came out in 1997, before “going viral” was even a term. Like “David After Dentist,” it wasn’t actually intended for online fame. According to a 2018 Wired article by Joe Veix, Vinny Licciardi worked at a tech company that sold security cameras, and wanted to demonstrate how they worked. He and his boss shot a promotional video showing Licciardi smashing his computer, meant to look like footage caught on a security cam. When the resulting “Bad Day” clip began to circulate through different companies via email and eventually ended up on MSNBC, he realized how wide it had spread. “There was no real precedent for this kind of thing,” Veix wrote.

This was before Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, when gaining a national audience meant having an in with one of the three major television networks. If you had a funny baby video to share, you sent it to America’s Funniest Home Videos and waited. Licciardi’s video was one of the first to break that trend by spreading to the masses online.

Then content-hosting platforms became content-sharing platforms, and everything changed. Suddenly, media could be discovered, consumed, and distributed all in one place, and the term “going viral,” entered the lexicon, connoting the uniquely quick spread of content on the internet.

A celebration of cuteness, or child exploitation?

By the time David DeVore uploaded the video of his son to YouTube, virality was becoming a bigger phenomenon. “I remember thinking, maybe this is what they call viral,” he said, when he saw the video had millions of views.

As media attention increased, so did the comments on their video. “That was my wife’s part-time job,” DeVore noted. For about a year, she spent her evenings scouring the comments and taking down anything too threatening or sexual. “We looked at it as a benevolent dictatorship.”

One common accusation was that DeVore was exploiting his son for money or fame. He finds this aggravating; he wasn’t even aware he could make money on the video until a marketer reached out more than a week after it went viral and suggested that he join YouTube’s partner program, in order to share in the ad revenue. “I don’t want to think about how much we lost in that first week,” he laughed. “But we did just fine over the next several years.”

The DeVores previously estimated that they had made about $150,000 from the video between when it launched in January 2009 and June 2010, though David DeVore declined to confirm. DeVore said the money helped keep the family afloat, since his wife was the sole breadwinner, and the kids’ private school tuition was expensive. After a while, DeVore started putting it straight into his son’s bank account. “If David had wanted to be a YouTube star, then that’s one thing,” he said. “But he didn’t.” He was just looking out for David.

But not everyone saw it that way. A Chicago Sun-Times columnist reacted with an op-ed titled “Drugged kids on video no laughing matter,” accusing DeVore of exploiting his son (for money! When he should have been protecting him!).

DeVore felt like he was being compared to people who blew pot smoke in their kids’ faces for fun. “She wrote her editorial from the perspective of the cops should’ve been called,” he said.

Though the op-ed stung, it also felt like an anomaly. “Most people weren’t like that, so it was annoying, but it wasn’t a big deal,” David explains. His father even tried making more viral videos with David’s brother Will, though none of them really caught on. “This was just a one-time thing,” DeVore says wistfully.

“Horrific blowback,” then and now

Amanda Lenhart, deputy director of the Better Life Lab at New America, a Washington, DC-based think tank, says the relatively minor backlash to “David After Dentist” is what separates contemporary viral fame from viral fame of the 2000s. “The conversation on the internet has become more challenging and quicker to be cruel,” she told me. “Things that went viral early on were less likely to have that kind of horrific blowback.”

Of course, that wasn’t always true. The “Star Wars Kid” video from 2003, which featured a Canadian teenager wielding a fake lightsaber, spurred so much mockery and bullying that he eventually had to change schools.

But today, the reaction to Star Wars Kid seems almost expected. In 2017, when model Chrissy Teigen shared photos of her daughter on Snapchat, a verified Twitter user started a thread suggesting that Teigen was part of a child-sex trafficking ring. It got more than 1,000 retweets and an article in the Washington Post. Later, Teigen sarcastically responded, “Thank you, Twitter, for verifying somebody who is esentially accusing me (with pictures of my daughter) of child abuse and pedophilia to their 50,000 followers.”

The following year, when she posted photos of her son Miles in a corrective helmet, “for his adorable slightly misshapen head,” so many people accused her of child abuse that she eventually followed up: “Good morning trolls! Just a friendly reminder that you do not indeed know absolutely everything.”

A new era of kid content

Today, an entire industry has sprung up around parents posting content of their kids. Instagram moms (and dads) can make thousands of dollars on photos of their babes in sponsored streetwear. But they also have to be careful.

In 2015, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that “innocent photos of children originally posted on social media and family blogs account for up to half the material found on some paedophile image-sharing sites,” citing a study from Australia’s Children’s eSafety Commissioner.

Cyberbullying is also getting worse. In 2007, a Pew Research survey found that 32 percent of teens who use the internet had experienced some form of online bullying; in 2018, that number was up to 59 percent. The 2018 survey also found that 29 percent of girls have been sent unsolicited explicit images. The digital world is getting meaner and darker, and kids and young girls are seeing the worst of it.

Anh Sundstrom, of the popular fashion blog 9to5Chic, said she and her husband made a pact to stop sharing photos of their daughter in order to better protect the child’s privacy. “Once she started looking like her own person … I stopped sharing a single photo of her face,” Sundstrom said.

Lenhart said these decisions were probably for the best. “We’re now getting to the point where people are coming of age with potentially a whole history of juvenilia both that they posted and that other people posted about them,” she said. “What does it mean when you’re going for your first job and there’s stuff about you being potty-trained on the internet?”

When I ask David Devore Jr. if he ever regretted the “David After Dentist” video, he said no. “There were like a lot of experiences that I had that I wouldn’t have had without it. Going places, meeting people … it was definitely positive,” he said.

David recently wrote about the experience for his college application essay to his dream school, the University of Florida. “I for sure milked it,” he said, chuckling. He talked about what he’d learned from being on TV and seeing how the entertainment world operates. “But there’s a lot more to me than just that,” he said. “And there’s more to my future than ‘David After Dentist.’” Luckily, the school seems to agree. On February 8, he received his acceptance.