Hall, meanwhile, says he gave up on Goose after his submission was flagged. “Honestly, I was excited about an app to make gay friends but disappointed I got banned for no good reason. I’m deleting it,” he tells WIRED via direct message.
He’s not the only one who has complained about Goose having an inconsistent verification process or inclusivity issues. One prospective member alleges photos in which he wore makeup were rejected; the app appears to be geared toward masc men and doesn’t allow pronouns in bios, but I encountered several femme accounts. Others, like Raffy Regulus, a 35-year-old community health liaison in New York City who identifies as nonbinary, complain about a lack of racial diversity, particularly where he lives in the Bronx.
When he filtered the map, which he says wrongly labeled his neighborhood, to a 10-mile radius in an attempt to locate more queer men who looked like him, “It was hella scarce of Black and Latinx people anywhere in NYC, which is so odd to me,” he tells WIRED. “I mostly encountered cis white men that looked either generic or AI generated—probably both. I’ve seen The Matrix.” He deleted the app after one week.
Goose cofounder Derek Chadwick tells WIRED the company does not make decisions based on users’ identity, gender expression, or personal presentation, and denies ever doing so. Asked if the app has plans to improve the experience for POC members, Chadwick says it was built without exclusionary mechanics they say have historically plagued legacy platforms, such as ethnicity filters.
It’s unclear how many users have actually joined Goose; the app declined to share numbers but said that members have initiated over 250,000 conversations since launch.
X user @whatsthattwunk, who asked that WIRED not publish his name due to professional concerns, found out that shirtless photos of him, including one snapshot he’d taken in a gym locker room in his underwear, had been uploaded to a Goose profile under the name “Robert,” a 33-year-old attorney in Nashville.
“For something that advertises as invite-only or [where] people need to apply to get accepted, I would think they would do like facial recognition on photo uploads. However, they still passed a catfish profile,” says the 27-year-old tech worker in San Francisco, who was most upset by the imposter thinking he looked 33.
Goose members are required to take a selfie within the app to authenticate their profiles, but the detection system doesn’t always catch fake profiles. @whatsthattwunk says the incident made him wonder “if they truly care about verifying real users or just gathering biometric data for AI usage.” Chadwick declined to confirm the verification system Goose uses because “doing so materially helps bad actors research bypass techniques.” He says the moderation team is “aggressively managing” the creation of fake profiles.
The company has also been accused of exploiting user data. On June 27, major concerns about data mining began to circulate online. Goose’s original terms of service gave the app full rights over user images, meaning the app would own any and all content that is uploaded or sent on the app in perpetuity and could use it to create “derivative works of, adapt, reformat, translate, and otherwise exploit all or any portion of your Member Content.” After facing backlash, Goose updated its TOS on June 30 to “explicitly limit [its] scope” over user rights. Goose, however, does use member content to train safety and anti-spam models, in addition to developing safety guidelines.
Despite the controversy that has surrounded the app’s launch, Lawrence appreciates the more vanilla aspects of Goose.
“When it comes to the dating space in the gay world, everyone wants to make a problem or pick it apart, when I think it’s pretty transparent about what it is and what it wants to do,” he says. “It’s a nice departure from the real debauchery of what we’re so used to being advertised to, which is just sex 24/7. To have one place that is just for something a bit more genuine is nice.”