‘Labelling should be voluntary’: Russia wants to ‘mark’ alimony debtors on dating sites
They want to take information from the public register of alimony debtors
Vice Speaker of the State Duma Vladislav Davankov has proposed to introduce mandatory labelling of the pages of alimony debtors on dating sites. In his appeal to the head of the Ministry of Digital Development of Russia, Maksut Shadaev, it is said that this measure “will accelerate the payment of alimony by debtors”.
“Taking into account the development of technologies for facial recognition in photographs, labelling can be added to the questionnaire of a defaulter of alimony automatically," said Vladislav Davankov.
It is proposed to take information about debtors from the public register. The law on its creation was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the spring of 2024. The register is to appear in May 2025 and will become part of the database of enforcement proceedings of the Federal Bailiff Service (FBS) of Russia. It will contain information about alimony debtors who have been brought to administrative or criminal responsibility for non-payment of funds for the maintenance of minor children or adult and incapacitated children, disabled parents. Besides, data on debtors declared wanted by the bailiff will be included in the register.
“Functionality can be useful, but it shouldn't be a stop factor for using a dating app”
As Andrey Bronetsky, CEO of the online dating platform in Russia, told Realnoe Vremya, it is not yet possible to assess the technical feasibility of implementing the initiative, since there are no details.
“First of all, the question arises — how is it supposed to connect a debtor user from the state system with his personal profile on a dating site. In general, such markings, in our understanding, should not be mandatory, but voluntary. Functionality can be useful, but it shouldn't be a stop factor for using a dating app," he said.
An important issue is working with foreign dating services, which, according to Andrey Bronetsky, “will not follow this norm”.
“If the measures are applied only to Russian companies, and foreign services will have freedom of choice, this will lead to a decrease in the competitiveness of Russian companies in favour of foreign ones," he concluded.
Russia is also developing a separate dating app with checking loans and alimony
They also want to include the possibility of checking a potential partner for debts on taxes, loans and alimony in the Sputnik dating app, which is being developed by developers from Murmansk. The search itself will be based not on photos, but on common interests, lifestyle, past relationships and health status.
“All this is displayed in anonymous questionnaires in the form of a text description. We pay great attention to the detailed processing of personal data: the application will be synchronised with a wide list of open databases, which means that it will be possible to legally check the absence of tax debts, alimony and much more from a potential partner," the project manager Pavel Kitov, quoted by Izvestia, explained the idea.
According to the developers, the account will necessarily be linked to third-party aggregators such as Verification.Online (Proverka.Online), as well as with open and paid legal databases.