The makers of dating apps mostly present ‘safety’ as a matter of managing the risks of interacting with matches online and in person, and not the risks of trusting an app to facilitate this process. Whether it’s safety guidance of Tinder 📄, Bumble 📄, Hinge 📄, Grindr 📄, or Feeld, the advice they offer focuses on these risks that exist whether you use an app or not.1 2 Through omission, they direct your attention away from their promiscuous collection and storage of data about you.
Dating apps require you to entrust them with your whereabouts, desires, personal photos, physical traits, age, chemical vices, beliefs, and the contents of conversations you will use to woo prospective partners. They will keep detailed records of your choices and actions. Any honest discussion of dating app safety requires examining the risks you will take by entrusting these apps with so much information.
What safety tips are dating apps not sharing?
1. Limit what you share in your profile and messages (it could become public)
Dating apps store everything you share in your profile, your location, the messages you share with other users, and most everything they watch you do.3 They store your information in centralized databases along with the data of millions of other users. Storing so many people’s desires, matching choices, and conversations in one repository makes it a ripe target for foreign intelligence services, ransomware gangs, and other extortionists who might exploit it.
Most dating were built by scrappy startups with threadbare security teams, forbidden from slowing the rapid innovation required in a hyper-competitive market. They are ill-matched against well-resourced intelligence agencies and nation-state sanctioned organized crime.4 Attackers that find ways to steal information from dating apps’ databases will presumably work hard to avoid being noticed so they can keep stealing it. It stands to reason that we only know about a small minority of actual breaches. For example, it’s surprising that we actually know about the 2015 breach of Ashley Madison (a dating service for those seeking extramarital affairs) as the thieves who stole it gave up the lucrative opportunity to extort the service’s users when they made the stolen data public. The thieves released every user profile and every message for the world to read.
When you’re deciding what data to share with a dating app and what data to withhold, you should do so knowing that there’s a good chance that everything you share, and every message you send other users via the app, will eventually be made public.
2. Move conversations to secure messaging platforms for more privacy
The best way to protect the privacy of your conversations is to move them to a secure messaging app.
You wouldn’t need to do this if dating apps prioritized your safety and implemented secure messaging. Secure (end-to-end encrypted) messaging is now industry standard for messaging apps, available in iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Skype*, Facebook Messenger*, and others.5 The lack of secure messaging discredits dating apps’ claims that they “design all of our products and services with your privacy in mind” (Hinge and Tinder from the Match Group) and that “making sure that our community is safe…is our highest priority” (Bumble). Dating apps discourage users from moving conversations to messaging apps, purportedly so that they can better prevent abuse,6 though some apps also want to examine your messages for such purposes as identifying “topics, sentiments, and trends”.7
Until dating apps offer secure messaging, your only option to prevent them from eavesdropping on your conversations is to take those conversations elsewhere. This is a delicate dance, because scammers and abusers will also encourage conversation partners to move off app so that dating apps can’t observe them. So, you and your match will need to converse enough to convince each other that you are trustworthy without giving out information that you wouldn’t want to become public. (Until you’re reasonably confident the other party is trustworthy, you already have a good reason not to share sensitive information you wouldn’t want to become public.)
Further complicating the decision to trust your match to move off app is that doing so may make it easier for them to learn more about you than you are ready to share. Many secure messaging apps currently require you to identify yourself to others using your phone number. You may not yet be ready for a match to be able to call you, text you, or to learn enough about you to stalk you. A web search on your phone number will likely lead stalkers to data brokers willing to sell them your full name, address, and other personal information.8
Fortunately, Signal, the app that pioneered the secure-messaging protocols now used by Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp, and others, now supports usernames9 so that you can start a conversation without sharing your phone number. You will still need to use your phone number to sign up, but Signal is a not-for-profit trusted by people in the know, including computer security professionals and journalists who need to protect their sources. It also has the features you’ve come to expect in chat apps, including support for emoji, stickers, voice, and video conversations. If you’re using dating apps and don’t already have Signal, you should get Signal.
3. It is your job to hide your profile in places you would not want it advertised.
Since dating apps compete to have as many profiles available to display at all times and locations, they are much more promiscuous in sharing profiles than many users want them to be. When you travel, many will share your profile with those around you without asking you if you want to meet people in these locations. They may not even make you aware that your profile is now being shared in a new locale. Their designs intentionally ignore the possibility that you might not want to advertise yourself to other users who happen to be close by during a 28-minute layover in Salt Lake City. (90 minutes at LAX…maybe?)
You’ll need to be especially careful to reign in their promiscuous sharing of your profile if you are traveling somewhere you would not want your profile advertised: maybe it’s not safe to be out about a certain part of your identity where you’re going; maybe you’re visiting friends and family who you are not yet out to (and who might use the same app); maybe you’re going someplace strictly professionally; or maybe you’ve told admirers that you’re visiting that you’re not open to new relationships and don’t want them to be wiser. To avoid being travel outed (or trouted), you will need to disable discovery in Tinder, pause in Hinge, snooze in Bumble, or turn of show me in Feeld. (Sadly, if Grindr has such a feature, it’s not easily discoverable via a web search.)
Still, hiding your profile when you travel cannot guarantee it will remain private. Anyone who sees your profile could, for example, take a screenshot and share it on social media. Data brokers have harvested dating profiles (as documented by TacticalTech). As someone with the patience to read to page 14 of Bumble’s 19-page privacy policy might learn, “you should assume that anything you post or submit on the App may be publicly-viewable and accessible.” [emphasis in original]
4. Using a dating app could expose personal biases even you don’t know you have
When dating apps record your actions, they often store more than just who you like and don’t like, but also how much time you spent looking at each part of the profile and how long it took you to make a decision.10 That data could reveal your explicit or implicit preferences about others’ race, body shape, disability status, and other aesthetic features discernible from photos, as well as their occupation, religion, and other demographics available from the text content.11 Even if you were to attempt to avoid such biases, there’s no way to be sure you’re successful. The only way to reduce the risk that your actions will reveal your biases is for apps to record less data about your actions and keep the information they do collect for less time. Unless forced by public pressure or regulation to collect and store data less promiscuously, they’ll continue to collect and store every morsel of data they can.
In summary, dating apps’ safety advice is designed to make you feel safe trusting them, but their drive to collect data about you means there’s much more to staying safe than they may want you to think about. Creating a profile on a dating app and sharing your location present risks to your safety even before you match with anyone. Since the makers of these apps do not like to discuss the safety risks of trusting them, or reduce your risk exposure by limiting what they collect, you’re on your own to protect yourself. Be safe out there.
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Many thanks to Craig Agricola for corrections and suggestions on earlier drafts.
Comment via my accompanying fediverse post.
For example, Tinder and Hinge, which offer the same safety tips as both are owned and operated by the Match Group. They divide their safety tips into three categories: ‘Online Safety’, which (aside from picking a password) covers the risks posed by online prospective partners; ‘Meeting in Person’, for when the prefix online no longer applies; and ‘Sexual Health’, for when the prefix ‘prospective’ no longer applies. The safety implications of putting your profile online and sharing it wherever you go are notably absent. ↩︎
A notable exception is Bumble’s article on What You Need to Know About Safety on Bumble 📄, which does advise caution in deciding how much detail to share in one’s profile:
We also encourage members of our community to be cautious when deciding what personal information to share in your profile. It’s absolutely fine to list your occupation as “account manager” at “tech company” rather than sharing details. Omitting photos that show you in a specific location you frequent (e.g. your go-to dog park or local bar) is another way to practice safer online dating.
Still, the implication is that the risk is not that this information might not be as protected as you would hope, or that it might be shared more promiscuously than you would like, but that safety is about what what you share with others you would want it shared with. Further, none of their examples suggest not sharing information at all, and they do little to help users understand who will be able to access the information that the user shared or explain why sharing detailed information might be risky. ↩︎
To quote from privacy policy shared Tinder and Hinge, the data collected includes “when you logged in, features you’ve been using, actions taken, information shown to you, referring webpages address and ads that you interacted with) and your interactions with other users (e.g., users you connect and interact with, and when you matched and exchanged messages with them).” ↩︎
Consider, for example, that Tinder, which launched in 2012, didn’t even implement the rudimentary step of encrypting the photos sent to the app from its servers until 2018 (after it was merged into the more-mature Match Group). ↩︎
Skype and Facebook Messenger offer end-to-end encryption, but users should be aware that their messaging is insecure until they manually request that the conversation be made private. ↩︎
Dating apps discourage you from moving conversations to secure messaging apps, claiming that eavesdropping helps them protect you from scams and other abusive behavior. There’s a touch of truth to this, but dating apps could provide secure messaging and still give you the power to share a conversation’s decryption keys when reporting abuse. They could analyze conversations for scams privately, on your device, to warn you about them without sending the data to a server. ↩︎
Bumble’s privacy policy reveals they also read your messages to “identify topics, sentiments, and trends across our Users” though, of course, safety is their “highest priority”. ↩︎
To further protect yourself from being stalked by your phone number, you should also consider using services like Kanary and Consumer Reports’s Permission Slip to find out what information data brokers know about you and demand that they stop selling it. ↩︎
Sadly, you can only use one username at a time, and so you’ll need to switch it frequently if you don’t want to use the same username for making professional contacts and for initiating contact with those you meet on dating apps. ↩︎
See, for example, what journalist Judith Duportail learned from requesting the information Tinder kept on her. ↩︎
For example, one could use as inputs to a prediction model the values of the above mentioned features, whether they were exposed before the user made a decision, and the amount of time they were exposed before the decision, and whether they were visible at the time of the decision. ↩︎