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Comment by amq | Hacker News Reader

A bit unrelated, but imagine how much data has Tinder collected, if Cambridge Analytica could do that much with just a comparatively unpopular quiz app.

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The quiz app wasn't the real data source though was it? People who want to take the quiz have to press "yes" on a menu that vaguely mentions "We need your friends list" and things like that, and those permissions were used to harvest the data as far as I understood, not the quiz itself.

Yes, the quiz was the bait to get to the real prize, your friends list and their info, likes, etc.

However, your answers to a different Facebook quiz in 2014 were scrutinized by Cambridge Analytica, who were looking for the “dark triad” of personality traits, scouting for sociopaths:

https://mobile.twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/97590547206...

Yet Tinder is just one of the 150 online brands owned by IAC, a company created by legendary TV executive Barry Diller. He probably knows the value of the data they have.

Wow, today I learned: Tinder, PoF, OkCupid, Match.com and more are owned by the same company.

Yeah and OkCupid's blog had a post that was very critical of match but mysterious disappeared when they were bought out.

And for awhile they were owned by one of the most evil companies of them all... Ticketmaster!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the quiz app just a way to gain access to a user's data? So it wasn't so much the content of the quiz that was revealing, just the access to data it provided.

I'm pretty sure their "psychometrics" play required the data users gave them as part of the quiz. The whole point of the exercise was to supposedly figure out people's personality traits from their social media profiles and let marketers target them based on that, and I think the personality quiz was probably the only way they could get ground truth information to train their model on.

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