What's He Really Like? Check the Lulu App
Not long ago, after Alexandra Amin, an assistant at Warner Brothers, broke up with an agent she had been dating for a year, her friend told her about a new, free, female-friendly social networking app that lets women anonymously review men who are their Facebook friends.
Context & Ripple Effects
On the day the Times runs its friendly feature on Alexandra Amin and Lulu — the free app that lets women anonymously review their male Facebook friends — the same-day reaction includes a pointed counter-take arguing the paper's piece sidesteps the controversy surrounding the app entirely. That split frames the story: Lulu's premise is reviewing people who never signed up to be reviewed, sourced from Facebook's social graph.
The timing matters because Facebook spent early November 2013 fielding exactly these questions — amending its privacy policies, removing a contested line about teen users, and facing a European Parliament hearing on thousands of user-data requests. Any consumer app whose core dataset is 'your Facebook friends' now operates under that spotlight.
First-order effects
- Men who appear in Lulu's database are being anonymously scored by exes and acquaintances without any opt-in, making non-consenting users the product input rather than the customer.
- Lulu's entire supply of reviewable men comes from the Facebook friend graph, so its growth is directly exposed to whatever Facebook decides third-party apps may do with that data.
Second-order effects
- Privacy scrutiny lands on Facebook as much as on Lulu: every app that repurposes friend-list data for something its subjects never chose gives regulators and Facebook's own policy team a fresh case for tightening platform permissions.
- Rivals in dating and social discovery must now choose whether anonymous peer-scoring of non-consenting users becomes a competitive requirement or a liability to differentiate against.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, review culture — built for restaurants and merchants — extends to people themselves, with social-graph metadata becoming raw material for consumer reputation scores.
- That shift pushes platforms toward stricter consent and API rules for anything resembling a person-level rating, making Facebook's permission system the de facto regulator of the category.
The trend: Consumer apps are converting Facebook's social graph into raw material for rating people rather than businesses, and the platform's permission regime is emerging as the real gatekeeper of that market.