Some teenagers are by no means ready to grow up. Growing up both intimidates and excites this generation of adolescents. Part of growing up that can scare this generation is dating.  Relationships can be confusing, and the idea of caring for someone else is just hard to understand.

Cell phones are used excessively in our daily lives, and each of them contains dozens of apps. Dating apps have recently been gaining more and more popularity among teens. One of the most popular apps on the iPhone and Samsung App Store is Tinder, placing 61st on the top 100 free apps downloaded the most on Apple’s App Store.

“While I myself do not use dating apps because I don’t need to, I do think that dating apps are dangerous because you never really know who’s real and who’s not,”  junior Rhiannon Daniels said. “If they are real, they might be a serial killer. You never know.”

Tinder was created in September 2012 by Sean Rad, Justin Manteen, Jonathan Badeen, Joe Munoz, Whitney Wolfe and Chris Glyczynski. The application currently has  over 50 million members and has been translated into 40 languages.

Over 10 million people use the app daily, and research done by GlobalWebIndex showed that 42% of Tinder users are already in relationships prior to downloading the app.

“I think Tinder is just a bad idea in general,” Daniels said. “The worst part is that there’s people who use it, and some of them lie and cheat on their partners with people who they met online from 50 miles away.”

Tinder allows users to make a profile and gives them the option to swipe left or right on other users’ photos. Swiping left means he is not interested in the person, swiping right means he is interested. If both users swipe right on each other, they have the option to start chatting. Chatting allows users to share photos as well. What should be something completely innocent could turn into something extremely disturbing.

Apps like Tinder make respect and decency completely disappear. Tinder has a reputation for being used solely to send inappropriate pictures, not for meeting and talking to a potential boyfriend or girlfriend. Sending inappropriate pictures, as many Tinder users do, is utterly disgusting. No one in his right mind would want to see disturbing pictures like that.

One also sets himself up for possibly being catfished, which is when one uses someone else’s image to attract people to him. Catfishing is a real crime and so common that it spawned its own TV show on MTV.

“I think dating apps are just as dangerous as the real world,” sophomore Sadie Michel said. “People aren’t always who they say they are, so you have to be careful. I think that it is weird for high schoolers to use dating apps.”