So why does Tinder need all that information on you? “To personalise the experience for each of our users around the world,” according to a Tinder spokesperson. A few months earlier, 70,000 profiles from OkCupid (owned by Tinder’s parent company Match Group) were made public by a Danish researcher some commentators have labelled a “white supremacist”, who used the data to try to establish a link between intelligence and religious beliefs. In May, an algorithm was used to scrape 40,000 profile images from the platform in order to build an AI to “genderise” faces.
As a few minutes with a perfectly clear tutorial on GitHub called Tinder Scraper that can “collect information on users in order to draw insights that may serve the public” shows, Tinder is only being honest. Tinder’s privacy policy clearly states: “you should not expect that your personal information, chats, or other communications will always remain secure”. The thought that, before sending me these 800 pages, someone at Tinder might have read them already makes me cringe. What will happen if this treasure trove of data gets hacked, is made public or simply bought by another company? I can almost feel the shame I would experience. Tinder: ‘You should not expect that your personal information, chats, or other communications will always remain secure.’ Photograph: Alamy Tinder’s privacy policy clearly states your data may be used to deliver “targeted advertising”. Consumers’ data is being traded and transacted for the purpose of advertising.” Personal data is the fuel of the economy. It knows how often you connect and at which times the percentage of white men, black men, Asian men you have matched which kinds of people are interested in you which words you use the most how much time people spend on your picture before swiping you, and so on. “Tinder knows much more about you when studying your behaviour on the app.
“What you are describing is called secondary implicit disclosed information,” explains Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology at Carnegie Mellon University. It knows the real, inglorious version of me who copy-pasted the same joke to match 567, 568, and 569 who exchanged compulsively with 16 different people simultaneously one New Year’s Day, and then ghosted 16 of them. Reading through the 1,700 Tinder messages I’ve sent since 2013, I took a trip into my hopes, fears, sexual preferences and deepest secrets. This is why seeing everything printed strikes you. “Apps such as Tinder are taking advantage of a simple emotional phenomenon we can’t feel data. “You are lured into giving away all this information,” says Luke Stark, a digital technology sociologist at Dartmouth University. A July 2017 study revealed Tinder users are excessively willing to disclose information without realising it. But I quickly realised I wasn’t the only one. I was amazed by how much information I was voluntarily disclosing: from locations, interests and jobs, to pictures, music tastes and what I liked to eat. Facebook has thousands of pages about you!”Īs I flicked through page after page of my data I felt guilty. “Every app you use regularly on your phone owns the same. “I am horrified but absolutely not surprised by this amount of data,” said Olivier Keyes, a data scientist at the University of Washington. With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye from personaldata.io and human rights lawyer Ravi Naik, I emailed Tinder requesting my personal data and got back way more than I bargained for.Some 800 pages came back containing information such as my Facebook “likes”, links to where my Instagram photos would have been had I not previously deleted the associated account, my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many Facebook friends I had, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened … the list goes on.
0 kommentar(er)
