Icelanders develop a mobile app to prevent them from kissing cousins

Love is a tricky business anywhere but in Iceland, there's added anxiety because of a question that often arises: are you my cousin?

The residents of the small country of about 320,000 are largely related to one another, according to a website developed several years ago to help residents track their ancestry, called the Book of Icelanders.

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At the time, the online genealogy database was heralded by media, such as the Global Post, as a way to avoid kissing your cousins. But who has time for a database search while in the throes of love?

Thanks to a mobile app built by students at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík that includes a function called the "Incest Destroyer," according to NBC, would-be lovers can get the messy work of finding any shared relations out of the way within minutes of meeting.

When two people bump their phones together, an alert appears if they share a grandparent, according to NBC.

"Bump the app before you bump in bed," read the student engineers' slogan for the feature, according to News of Iceland.

According to the news outlet, one person who commented on the Android website said if the app had been available sooner, he probably wouldn't have gone home with his cousin. Probably.

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No one appears to have asked the students if their motivation for building the app was a similar traumatizing experience.