The challenges of dating. You meet someone and you hit it off. You ask their name, phone number and if they are a cousin… Well not always, but in Iceland which has a population of only 320,000 people, nearly everyone is distantly related. The gene pool for the country is limited.
To combat this a new smart phone app was developed specifically for Icelanders. The Islendiga-App — “App of Icelanders” was developed by three university students who entered a contest for new creative uses of Islendingabok, or Book of Icelanders. Islendingabok is an online database of Icelandic residents and their family trees stretching back 1200 years and covers 95% of the population. The smart phone app is basically an app to prevent incest in Iceland. But how does it work?
Using the incest app
To use the app, users only need to bump phones together. If a close family connection is detected the phones will alert the users if they are closely related and it can even emit a warning tone. This helps prevent a very real Icelandic social embarrassment. Imagine you meet a someone and introduce them to the extended family only to discover that the person you have been sleeping with is a second cousin. It would not be comfortable at all.
The app even has a catchy slogan. “Bump the app before you bump in bed” and it has been downloaded over 4000 times on the android market.
