Key Takeaways
- Consent Guard follows other leading dating apps in the push to provide AI-powered trust and safety features that directly address consent.
- Hily partnered with a sexual educator to help demystify consent and reframe it as a conduit for empowerment, trust, and even pleasure.
- The app’s CPO explained how Consent Guard sheds light on digital consent and increases user demand for tools that help express boundaries.
Since the very first sext, online dating platforms have fought against unsolicited nudes. For Hily, the key to winning that fight may, ironically, depend on allowing them to exist.
Hily’s new safety tool, Consent Guard, gives users on both ends of an explicit pic or text the choice to rethink, or accept/decline, the explicit content.
Consent Guard’s existence is partially due to the modern dater’s demand for control over their own safety. Platforms are responding in kind, with Bumble and Grindr using AI to flag explicit content. Meanwhile, Tinder’s “Are You Sure?” and “Does This Bother You?” notifications address the issue from both the sender and the receiver’s points of view.
“Dating today is about more than just matching – it’s about trust,” Liubomyr Pivtorak, CPO at Hily, reiterated to DatingNews. He believes that Consent Guard is an important step toward earning that sought-after trust.
In fact, he describes trust as a major catalyst for growth. “It’s how we turn Hily into not only a bigger platform, but a safer and more trusted one,” he told us.
Consent as a Path To Trust and Pleasure
To educate app users on what consent really means, Hily consulted a real expert in sexuality and consent: Dr. Mindy DeSeta. “Consent is not a mood killer — it’s actually a big turn-on,” DeSeta says in the press release, clearing up a long-running misconception.
“Instead of having an explicit photo pop up at the worst possible moment, imagine getting a notification that someone wants to get a little hot and heavy. That’s mental foreplay!” Dr. DeSeta added.
A consent tool lets users choose whether to accept or decline the text or image, allowing them to explore their sexuality with more comfort and freedom.
While it provides freedom of choice for users, a consent tool also has the power to clarify consent, once and for all. After all, a willy-nilly approach to consent doesn’t fly with modern daters, which is partly why Hily partnered with Dr. DeSeta in the first place.
“[Dr. DeSeta] brings credibility, expertise, and depth,” Pivtorak explained to DatingNews — three qualities that modern daters crave from dating platforms.
Involving a real expert doesn’t only add an air of authority, but helps genuinely educate users on the complexities of consent, setting them up for a more enjoyable dating app experience.
Dr. DeSeta’s expertise turns Consent Guard into a helpful educational tool rather than another dimensionless app feature that only exists because it can.
When a platform gives users the power of consent, they’re redefining the word for a modern era. “Consent is often framed only as protection from harm, but it is actually the foundation for trust and even pleasure,” Natassia Miller, AASECT-Certified Sexologist and Intimacy Coach, told DatingNews.
Digital Consent Is Overlooked, Says Hily CPO — But No More
Any platform’s trust and safety efforts, including Hily’s Consent Guard, exist because of the noticeable void in the industry’s approach to safety, trust, and yes, consent.
Like most new features on apps these days, Consent Guard depends on AI and custom algorithms to function properly. But Hily reassures users that it doesn’t betray their trust, even when using AI to detect explicit content.
“The analysis isn’t linked to personal data, and it never scans conversations between users,” according to the press release. “When such words or visual elements are identified, the message will not be sent and consent guard steps in immediately.”
They don’t only want safety features; they want to be able to trust the apps they upload their personal information and photos to.
“We talk a lot about sexual consent in real life, but digital consent often gets overlooked,” Pivtorak says in the press release.
Miller sees Consent Guard as a positive sign of change in the industry — and perhaps even as an overall cultural shift toward dating apps that value human connection over clicks. “Tools like Consent Guard do not just block unwanted content; they normalize the act of asking,” she said.
Dating platforms are increasingly expected to give users ways to express consent. With more apps re-thinking their approach to content violations and consent, users also expect innovative tools like Consent Guard to help articulate their boundaries.
