One Tinder user’s data request turned into 800 pages of probing info

Enlarge / This image is from Tinder's "Anywhere" service, which doesn't require a smartphone to use. Meaning, even more people will be able to cough up their data to the popular dating service. (credit: Tinder)

In March of this year, German reporter Judith Duportail acted on her rights, thanks to the European Union's data protection directive (DPD), to request a copy of all personal data captured by the Tinder dating service over a span of nearly four years. The result may not surprise anybody familiar with how much data free online services gather about their users, but it may be the most vivid personal identifier (PID) disclosure yet from the popular dating app.

Duportail's frank article at the Guardian makes no bones about her dating history over the past few years. That detail is provided in part to describe just how much sensitive information appeared in the massive 800-page report that Tinder sent her. Much of the data was sourced primarily from Tinder itself, including complete message histories and geolocation data for every interaction on the app, while other data was sourced from linked accounts at Facebook and Instagram. Duportail does not go into granular detail about which parts of her Facebook and Instagram profiles were included, but she says Tinder tracked all of her Facebook "likes" and stored her Instagram photos even after she had de-linked that photo-sharing account from her Tinder profile.

Data researcher and PersonalData.io co-founder Paul-Olivier Dehaye took to his Twitter account to confirm that the process of retrieving Duportail's data from Tinder was exhaustive. "It took real involvement of one data protection activist (me) and a human rights lawyer for them to answer," Dehaye wrote. "Two [data protection directive] complaints, dozens of e-mails, months of waiting. Far from easy!"

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