A woman was curious, so she asked the company that runs Tinder if she could see all the info that they have stored about her. She was shocked at the sheer amount of random information they’ve got, all the way down to what messages were sent to what matches.
Judith says that Tinder gave her about 800 pages worth of information. She was then able to see just how much information about her life, no matter how small and insignificant, they have stored. She says that some of her “deepest, darkest secrets” were revealed, and even into her aspirations, things she’s afraid of, and even included her “sexual preferences.”
She says “Tinder knows me so well. 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.” It knows her education, travelled-to places, where she’s lived, and even pictures that she says she “deleted.”
A data scientist says that every app you interact with stores information about you. Maybe not to a name, but about you, none the less. The scientist says that he thinks Facebook has “thousands of pages” of data about each of their users, pages they like, preferences, all sorts of info. Because we don’t see all the data collected in one source like Judith, we have no idea just how much we’ve given away, or how much they collect, no matter how insignificant we think it is.
The worst that Tinder uses this info for is to target ads to you specifically, things you’ve searched for, things you’re interested in, stuff like that. So far as we know they don’t sell any of the information, but the data scientist says that if that information were to be hacked, there’s no saying what for, or where, the info can be used.
Judith made a full “report” on the info that Tinder gathered, and you can check it out here.
