Browser Dating wants your search history — all of it. Your 3 a.m. Reddit rabbit holes, your medical anxieties, your peculiar curiosities about President Trump’s hair, and whether cats plot murder.
According to the company’s website, “We all leave unique digital footprints as we navigate the web. This project aims to find meaningful connections between people based on their browsing habits, creating a new kind of dating experience.” Call me a skeptical Luddite (I’ve been called worse), but turning search history into a love language feels less like innovation and more like surveillance with a flirty font. (RELATED: Is This the Stupidest Sentence of 2025?)
While the app remains relatively niche, its existence signals something darker about where we’re headed: the complete dissolution of the boundary between private self and public commodity. This is the logical endpoint of a dating culture that has confused vulnerability with exhibitionism, intimacy with data sharing, and connection with constant monitoring. Dating apps didn’t start here. (RELATED: Loneliness Is the New Oil)
They began simply enough — photos, age, location. Then came personality quizzes, Spotify playlists, and political filters. Each step promised a more “authentic” match, but what it really delivered was deeper profiling. Now we’ve arrived at the inevitable destination: the monetization of our most private moments.
Some in the tech space call this “honesty,” but there’s nothing honest about turning your browser history into bait. When we turn our search history into a dating profile, we’re not opening up — we’re outsourcing our inner lives to machines, selling our psychological fingerprints in exchange for a shot at digital chemistry.
The distinction matters. Real intimacy develops through time, through shared experiences, through the gradual revelation of self that comes with earned trust. It grows through awkward silences, inside jokes, long walks, and hard conversations. It’s shaped by things that don’t translate into data: how someone holds eye contact when you’re vulnerable, how they respond when you fail, whether they remember the small things you mentioned weeks ago. What Browser Dating offers is intimacy theater: the appearance of deep knowledge that skips the one thing that makes love real — human effort.
Browser Dating’s central promise — that your search history reveals your “true self” — rests on a fundamental category error. It mistakes the noise your brain makes when no one’s looking for some essential truth about who you are. Your late-night spirals into WebMD or conspiracy forums don’t define you any more than a crumpled grocery list defines your values. These are fragments of curiosity, panic, boredom, desire — scattered and fleeting. Out of context, they’re meaningless. But fed into an algorithm, they’re turned into patterns, packaged as insight, and sold back to you as compatibility.
Your browser history isn’t your soul.
Your browser history isn’t your soul. It’s the digital equivalent of picking your nose — natural, necessary, and not meant for public consumption. These moments of private exploration are psychologically essential. They’re how we process the world without performance, without audience, without judgment. When that space gets colonized by the attention economy, we lose something we can’t get back: the ability to exist independently of external validation.
This represents more than just another privacy violation — it’s the systematic erosion of solitude itself. We’ve become a civilization that can’t bear to have a single thought go unmonetized, every digital impulse fed into the attention economy’s insatiable maw. The psychological space we need to exist as whole human beings shrinks with each new app promising to “optimize” human connection.
Romance, at its core, requires mystery. Not deception or game-playing, but the genuine mystery of another person’s inner life. Dating apps systematically destroy this mystery by front-loading information that should develop naturally, turning discovery into a checklist, replacing the delicious uncertainty of getting to know someone with the false certainty of profile data.
But hearts aren’t search engines. Love isn’t a matching algorithm. Romance isn’t an optimization problem that can be solved with better data inputs.
The deeper issue is what this reveals about Silicon Valley’s chronic misunderstanding of human problems. Tech companies assume that loneliness is a matching problem rather than a social and cultural crisis, and that better algorithms can solve fundamentally human challenges requiring human solutions. They’ve built an entire industry on the premise that connection can be engineered, that compatibility can be calculated, that love can be optimized.
Consider what we’ve lost along the way: the subtle art of reading a room, the nerve it takes to walk up to someone without a compatibility score in hand, the thrill of being caught off guard by who we’re drawn to, the slow burn of attraction that unfolds over time. That kind of connection can’t be coded. It has to be lived.
We’ve traded serendipity for swipes, mystery for metadata, and genuine uncertainty for the false certainty of curated matches. The most radical act in our hyper-connected age might be the simplest: keeping some things to ourselves, meeting people in physical spaces where algorithms can’t mediate every interaction, and trusting that love — unpredictable, inefficient, analog love — will find a way. Not curated, not optimized, not reverse-engineered from search data, but discovered in the pauses and imperfections. In a glance held too long. In a joke that lands wrong but still makes you laugh. In the slow unfolding of two flawed people trying to understand each other.
READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn:
We Owe Brad Pitt an Apology. Seriously.