Match.com
dating sites spy on you and rape your privacy
Handing
over your personal data is now often the cost of romance, as online
dating services and apps vacuum up information about their users’
lifestyle and preferences.
Why it matters:Dating
app users provide sensitive information like drug usage habits and
sexual preferences in hopes of finding a romantic match. How online
dating services use and share that data worries users,according
to anAxios-SurveyMonkey
poll, but the services nonetheless have become a central part of
the modern social scene.
What they know:
Everything you
put on your profile, including drug use and health status.Web
trackers can examine your behavior on a page and how you answer key
personal questions. JDate and Christian Mingle, for example, both
use a tracker called Hotjar thatcreates
an aggregate heat mapof where on a web page
users are clicking and scrolling.
Every time you
swipe right or click on a profile.“These
can be very revealing things about someone, everything from what
your kinks are to what your favorite foods are to what sort of
associations you might be a part of or what communities you
affiliate with,” says Shahid Buttar, director of grassroots advocacy
for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
How you're
talking to other people.A reporter for
the Guardianrecently
requestedher data from Tinder and received
hundreds of pages of data including information about her
conversations with matches.
Where you are.Location
data is a core part of apps like Tinder. “Beyond telling an
advertiser where someone might physically be at a given time,
geolocation information can provide insights into a person’s
preferences, such as the stores and venues they frequent and whether
or not they live in an affluent neighborhood,” says former FTC chief
technologist Ashkan Soltani.
The details:Popular
dating websites broadly collect information on their users for
advertising purposes from the minute they first log on to the site,
according to an analysis by the online privacy company Ghostery of the
websites for OkCupid, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, Christian Mingle,
JDate and eHarmony. (Ghostery, which performed the analysis for Axios,
lets people block ad trackers as they browse the web.)
Popular
services broadly track their users while they search for potential
matches and view profiles. OkCupid runs 10 advertising trackers
during the search and profile stages of using its site, Ghostery
found, while Match.com runs 63 — far exceeding the number of
trackers installed by other services. The number and types of
trackers can vary between sessions.
The
trackers can collect profile information. Match.com runs 52 ad
trackers as users set up their profiles, Plenty of Fish runs 21,
OkCupid runs 24, eHarmony runs 16, JDate runs 10 and Christian
Mingle runs nine.
The
trackers could pick up where users click or where they look, says
Ghostery product analyst Molly Hanson, but it's difficult to know
for sure. "If you're self-identifying as a 35 year-old male who
makes X amount of money and lives in this area, I think there's a
wealth of personal information that should be pretty easy to capture
in a cookie and then send to your servers and package it and add it
to a user profile," says Jeremy Tillman, the company's director of
product management.
Many of these
trackers come from third parties.OkCupid
installed seven ad trackers to watch users as they set up their
profiles. Another 11 came from third parties at the time Ghostery ran
its analysis. Trackers include data companies that often sell data to
other companies looking to target people, Hanson says.
Match
Group owns a number of dating services, including Tinder and OkCupid.
The privacy policies say user data can be shared with other Match
Group-owned services.
What they’re
saying:A spokesperson for Match Group
says in a statement said that data collected by its companies "enables
us to make product improvements, deliver relevant advertisements and
continually innovate and optimize the user experience."
"Data
collected by ad trackers and third parties is 100% anonymized," the
spokesperson says. "Our portfolio of companies never share personally
identifiable information with third parties for any purpose."
The
primary business model of the industry is still based around
subscriptions rather than targeting ads based on personal data,
notes Eric Silverberg, the CEO of gay dating app Scruff.
"I
would argue that the incentive to share information is actually
lower for dating businesses than it is for media businesses and news
sites. ... We have subscription services and our members pay us for
the services we provide and the communities we create,” he says.
Why you’ll hear
about this again:Researchers routinelyuncover
security risks related to dating apps.
A
security firm recentlyclaimedto
have found security flaws in Tinder.
The
2015 Ashley Madison hackresultedin
the personal data of users of the site, which purported to
facilitate infidelity, being exposed.