All Your Horny Facebook Friends, Listed

Finding someone to sleep with—no complications, no developing narrative, just two adults acting on a mutual preference—is harder in a major city than the population density would suggest. You’d think proximity to millions of other humans would help. It doesn’t, particularly. The city mostly just offers more elaborate forms of nothing happening.

Bang With Friends was built for exactly this problem. A Facebook-connected app that let you flag which friends you’d sleep with, silently cross-referencing against their own flags and only surfacing a match when both sides had opted in. Clean. Discreet. The kind of system that could quietly resolve a tension that’s been simmering for months, or absolutely incinerate a friendship in a single notification—depending entirely on what the other person had been thinking.

Except the anonymous part turned out to be optimistic. A site called Bang With Friends Exposed started publishing exactly which of your Facebook contacts had accounts—who was in the market, who wasn’t. The implications are existentially interesting. Your boss. That colleague three desks over. Someone from university you’ve been idly curious about since 2007. All of it potentially sitting there, indexed, waiting for you to look.

I could theoretically name some people from my own list. But I know them, and they’d mostly shrug—the type of person who signs up for something called Bang With Friends has already made their peace with being found out. If you happen to see my name on there: purely journalistic research. I was investigating the phenomenon. Obviously. …okay, maybe not purely.