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Categories of personal information collected

policies.tinder.com

149 pointsixacto115 comments

The submitted title ("Tinder extrapolates estimations on your intelligence and sells it") broke the site guidelines by editorializing [1]. Cherry-picking one detail is already a strong form of editorializing, and it's not clear if this even is a true detail, or just a wild spin.

You're welcome to say what you think is important about an article, but please do so in the comments, where your interpretation will be on a level playing field with everyone else's [2], and where you'll have space to explain how you arrived at your interpretation. Cramming a sensational charge like this into the title is basically a form of trolling.

Titles are by far the biggest influence on threads, so this matters a lot.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Frankly, in this case that’s a load of crap and editing the title to not contain the company name makes it look like YC are in their pockets.

The company name is right up there. From the guidelines: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Not in Tinder's pockets.)

Does someone here scan all the domain names, and not just the titles, when browsing HN? Genuinely curious, please comment if you do.

When a title catches my attention and I'm about to open either the link or its comments page, I automatically look over at the domain too before clicking.

Yeah, I do. It helps to weed-out a lot of junk.

Sometimes, if quickly looking for something read for the moment, I'll only scan the domains.

I think that's a good rule when linking to secondary sources, because the name of the source isn't essential to understanding the topic.

But the name of the company the article is about is important enough to be part of the title, even if the link happens to go to an article on a domain associated with that company.

I can understand if you don't to debate those rules, and in general I agree with them, but can't anyone just circumvent this rule by tweeting the editorializing sentence + the link in question?

In that case we'd probably change the URL because the site guidelines ask: Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter, and a sensational tweet with a link wouldn't count as an informative post in its own right.

If, however, a person wrote a substantive and accurate explanation of how some obscure corporate boilerplate actually masks the selling of personal intelligence tests, that of course would be a fine thing to submit.

Just want to commend you, dang, for doing such a great job (in my opinion) of moderating this site. I don't mean that you're great for doing things how I want them, but for trying to hold things to the posted standards and also being visible about it. This is one of the things that I think keeps the quality of conversation on this website so high.

It's time that something like this is illegal. If you have a dating site, all the information you collect from the user should only be used for the purpose of the dating app. Using the data to feed different business should be forbidden or the user should be paid for their data and be aware who exactly will receive it and what they are going to do with it. They managed to force cannabis growers to track plants from seed to a ready product, they should force such companies to track the data so that you can know exactly who is doing what and more importantly you should be able to pull your data at any point in time.

???

This is the foundation of the entire internet as we know it.

The concept of data ownership is questionable. When you do business with me, and I observe you, are not my own observations my data?

I am all for privacy, but I don't think that we get to dictate what other people are allowed to do with "our" data, legitimately obtained through the course of normal business. Observations are our own data, including observations about others.

You don't own your reputation, for instance.

It's the same with software - you can read all the ones and zeroes and memorise them, but you cannot write them back and sell it. Imagine a human is an object and has various attributes that you can exploit. You should only be allowed to use that data for legal reasons or if it serves purpose of the product you are selling.

I agree with your stance on this, but also there’s a pretty compelling argument for the other side. Especially when we’re talking about the equivalent of secretly recording audio and video at see-your-pores fidelity and extracting fingerprints from any product you touch, as well as doing forensic analysis on the dirt of your boots to find out where you’ve been.

At what point should we draw the line of what’s “[reasonable] observation”, and what’s not?

They apparently share:

> Inferences drawn from any of the information identified above to create a profile about you reflecting your preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes.

with:

> Vendors and professional services organizations who assist us in relation to the business or commercial purposes laid out herein

Presumably this is a broad enough definition to encompass any buyer who pays Tinder, thereby supporting the commercial purpose of the business.

Business purposes include:

"Short-term, transient use, including, but not limited to, the contextual customization of ads shown as part of the same interaction"

So, they don't go to Data Brokers Inc and say "I'll sell you an estimate of gnicholas's IQ for $xxx", but they will go to Scams Inc and say "Hey, wanna target ads to people we think are stupid?"

All companies with a brand name to protect do the latter but not the former. It's why "selling your data" is such a deceptive phrase, since most people assume this means your private data is put on a USB stick and given to bad guys...

You’re right about the literal “your data isn’t for sale” claim.

Still, I have a fun fact: at one point in time, Facebook would let you target an ad to “all men who have any of this list of N emails”, and then accept your list of N emails be N-1 women’s emails, and one man’s emails.

Result: direct targeting of a single individual.

Or, in this case: direct querying of a single individual’s attributes.

I imagine tinder might have closed this hole as well, or maybe it never gave advertisers those exact tools. But these advertising tools can leak a lot of data, and the vendor’s incentive is to leak that data while swearing up and down that it’s safe.

“...but not limited to...”

"Short term, transient" is the key part.

This is in addition to all of the business purposes listed in their general Privacy Policy, so "Short term, transient" is not a limitation on all business purposes — just the additional ones listed here (in the CA addendum).

As I mention in another comment, the general Privacy Policy includes some very broad language that appears to include selling data to third parties.

Fascinating business idea. Albeit highly immoral.

Stupid people are easier to manipulate, especially if you continue to commercially bombard them with information coming from all different sources. And if you control all the channels that they see, then they have no alternate reality. Heck, this applies to seemingly smart people also, if they don’t reach out to different sources for a balanced view of information.

This is now becoming very true with ad networks like Google’s ad monopoly. Regardless of what website you visit, the ads all come from the same source.

So now, one use case for this is political manipulation. You can start to target people of a certain IQ range, to get them to think the same way, which can then ultimately coerce them to vote a specific way.

So now, you have a direct pathway, from planting a seed of an idea, to political manipulation, to actual physical reality.

This is now starting to sound like the premise of The Outer Limits.

But hey, morality never stopped aspiring entrepreneurs from making a billion dollars.

Yes, but they also incorporate by reference all of the business purposes described in their general Privacy Policy (this page is the California addendum).

In the general Privacy Policy, [1] business purposes includes:

> Develop, display and track content and advertising tailored to your interests on our services and other sites

The "and other sites" seems like it would include selling user data to third parties, at least by my reading (IAAL).

1: https://policies.tinder.com/privacy/intl/en

A less malevolent interpretation could simply be that they're using AWS services to do whatever machine learning / algorithms for profile matching.

It's very possible they aren't selling data, just sharing it with 3rd parties like AWS, Google Cloud, or whatever vendors they use for data processing / analysis.

But I agree, if they have no intent on selling the data, the wording could be narrowed to make that more clear.

That's why you should delete and recreate your profile several times to skew up the analytics, and see how insidious it is.

If you sign up for Tinder as a guy, over 30, the premium and gold features are $29.99+, as someone under 27, it becomes 9.99-14.99, monthly before the discount of upfront charging.

Then they say they don't do Elo Score anymore, but I question that, if your profile is rated higher in a geographic location, and then you change location again, it will rank higher and be more apparent (to my own A/B testing.)

Then again the second part is totally my interpretation, it's a fun game, and the API is really annoying.

It's a fun time sink, I really wonder more of what other data collection they do. Imagine being able to export an entire list of users, by geographic location, who own cats (or have a cat present in photo, tensorflow) to CSV and then pivot table it.

Fantastic, scary fantastic.

I can with almost complete certainty say that Hinge uses an Elo score. I'd be stunned if Tinder et al. don't do the same.

> That's why you should delete and recreate your profile several times to skew up the analytics

Don't do this. A friend got banned for deleting account a lot of times.

Also, I don't see any problem in using ELO. Because of skewed gender ratio on dating apps problems exist; but it makes sense to show most profiles in similar normalized ELO ranges. Isn't that how most humans pick their date in online world anyway?

What's the downside of a ban on Tinder though? Can't you just recreate an account again and again anyway? The worst you have to lose is a burner phone number.

You have no idea. The Tinder ban applies to the entire fingerprint consisting of at least: phone number, Google/iCloud account (used with the app store), physical device. Then it creeps over, e.g. using another device and phone number but the same Google/iCloud account incorporates the first two into the banned fingerprint, using another phone number from the same physical device incorporates the phone number into the banned fingerprint. Discussions on Reddit claim that they use the WiFi SSID for fingerprinting as well. It's really creepy.

Graphs and nodes: Very few people understand the possibilities when software can take a single record of two things being connected, and connect the dots with everything else they already know about you.

Yeah that doesnt work anymore, if you recreate your profile several time, you wont get banned, but you will be granted a low ELO score for life. And don't try to create a new account with a new phone number of new facebook account, they also match old accounts with the phone itself. Bumble is doing the same.

If you want to recreate your account, you need, a new facebook account, but with friends on it, otherwise they know it is a fake one, a new number, a new phones and new pictures. So easy to say that this is impossible

We've got vastly different understandings of what is impossible.

I've noticed this. It's really hard for social reputation and dependence for Google/Apple ID/Facebook for that web SSO feature.

e-sim works, but you can't fall on a cheap sim. But it makes sense, age of facebook account, number of friends, pictures..

I wonder if they checksum/hash pictures.

>I don't see any problem in using ELO.

>it makes sense to show most profiles in similar normalized ELO ranges

Let me highlight (but not explicitly point out, so you may mentally connect the dots yourself) the exact problem with both of these statements:

Suppose the 'logic' of whatever meta-algorithm one implicitly presupposes as behind picking the desiderata for picking the appropriate algorithm to use for the problem as principally sound. Then, by extension WOLG, it NOWADAYS actually makes no sense at all to continue using ELO, because significantly better algorithms have long since come along. Two by now both ancient examples, check the first one for why & how ELO sucks even for its original intended usage, and check the second one for a tremendously improved version:

* https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/trueskill-r... (2005+)

* https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/trueski... (2018) (Citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1017946959272817486...)

Oh and, as one may guess, neither of these examples represents the State of the Art in this sector (Check the citations above for that.). Also, for more papers by the Microsoft Research group working on that project, check here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/trueskill-r...

Now that we've clarified that, I'd like to ask:

Do you still feel sure whether this seems like an appropriate class of algorithms to leverage for dating? Assuming of course that users want to find partners, as opposed to good opponents. Albeit:

One might speculate algorithmically supplying well-matching opponents instead of potential partners, while (mis)labeling them as more potentially likely compatible than by chance partners would make for a tremendously better—albeit highly amoral—repeat business model on part of the platforms, at least in the relative short-term, wouldn't you say?

If your argument is that there are better 'rating' algorithms than ELO which can be used. Sure, go ahead and use them. I wasn't championing ELO specifically. I meant any rating algorithm which can theoretically rank individuals. Obviously, no solution of ranking individuals on the concept of wins/losses is going to be perfect. Btw, I had the luck of implementing the bayesian Trueskill system you mentioned in some product I worked on.

> Do you still feel sure whether this seems like an appropriate class of algorithms to leverage for dating? Assuming of course that users want to find partners, as opposed to good opponents.

Imagine there being `n` heterosexual males and `n` heterosexual females on a dating platform. If all have to be paired as couples and if we can rank them by their 'popularity'. Don't you think most at the first glance would be more comfortable picking someone about their rating or higher? Just look at the skew of likes people get depending on their attractiveness from old OkCupid blogs.

In dating apps, the rating most likely comes from the person's looks. Does that mean they are good matches? No way of knowing this. But does that mean they are more likely to swipe on each other? Probably yes. We can show them people at random but that doesn't mean that they will swipe on someone whom they don't consider to be at least in the same ballpark as them on attractiveness.

The only way we can get better potential partners is if we have a lot of potential data about every user not limited to just looks. Also, even in that case if the other person is not on the same scale on attractiveness, the other person will have to take a leap of faith on whatever matching system they have.(which if you go by social experiments, people don't do)

Considering how much data FB has about users through their platforms, they are the ones who truly can come close to matching people on common interests but I am not sure how successful even their dating venture has been.

List of people surprised by Tinder selling data to advertisers:

Jokes aside, I don’t think the people using Tinder care at all, or can be convinced why they should care. I’m curious, because it never comes up on HN, but are there serious competitors to things like Tinder that are more transparent about how they operate? I feel like all the money is in hiding the details of your “love algorithm” because it’s complete BS, makes it easier to sell as magic if you can’t see the man behind the curtain.

Some people care, but what's the alternative? There's no GNU Tinder.

You can always do it like Stallman:

https://stallman.org/extra/personal.html

how does he advertise this?

Apparently rms has a "pleasure card" he gives out to people:

https://www.reddit.com/r/justneckbeardthings/comments/2vkeze...

He used some advertising on his door

https://miro.medium.com/max/2100/1*lDSkAjF1958TpEafxuJsLg.jp...

>You can always do it like Stallman:

Yikes, no thanks

GNU Tinder isn’t a bad idea? Come to think of it. Good tech + aggressively self-selected user base.

Gotta be a CLI though

lmao a CLI dating app now you’re thinking!

Don't knock it, it works! I met my first real girlfriend through IRC when I was 13.

> Good tech + aggressively self-selected user base.

So a sausage fest?

Does not look like a place that will offer good matches to the majority of people (and for those where that would work, they wouldn't probably need it)

> So a sausage fest?

So a dating app?

Stock photos plus GPT-3 could probably keep the illusion going for quite some time.

Why not StyleGAN2 and GPT-3?

Bug 0 would have to be this:

> GitHub, the world's leading repository of open-source code, surveyed 5,500 open source users and developers from around the world on a range of topics. It also asked for demographic information. And it was informative. Of that randomly selected cohort, a full 95 percent of respondents were male. Only three percent identified as female and one percent as non-binary.

https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor...

Though really it might not be as bad as all that, if you did it Sadie Hawkins style.

Let ordinary women know of a place they can have their pick of eligible men making above-median incomes and probably enough of them would show up to justify the men in creating a profile on the thing.

So, we should go GNU Grindr. Gotcha.

> ...a full 95 percent of respondents were male

Well, that’s exactly the problem I see with surveys in general: people read the above statement and automatically parse it as „95 percent of GitHub users are male“.

No, they aren’t. Or maybe they are. We don’t know. What we know is the percentage of respondents who identified as male. We know nothing - not. one. thing. - about how many % of GitHub users are male. What if 80% of female users simply didn’t bother to respond to the survey?

> We don’t know. What we know is the percentage of respondents who identified as male. We know nothing - not. one. thing. - about how many % of GitHub users are male.

Ridiculous. We know the survey has error bars. Maybe they're large. But it's still information.

> What if 80% of female users simply didn’t bother to respond to the survey?

Then Github users would still be at least 84% male.

I look forward to the ASCII art profile pictures

Real life works pretty well if there’s no pandemic currently going on

For a large number of people, it obviously doesn't. If it did, there wouldn't be a market for dating apps. Tinder and Grindr each have a user base in the millions. Many people pay for dating websites like OKCupid. This was true before the pandemic, and continue to be true.

Do dating apps "work" for those people any better than real life though? I'd argue that if you are male, you need to be in the top X (20?) percent to get any success on these apps, and if you are there then you'd get just as much success in real life.

The market exists because swiping is the easy route. But that does not necessarily imply a higher rate of success.

As a long-time long-distance dater, I must acknowledge "real life" has some killer features:

1. You both must be local, which means you have opportunities to hang out and see each other in a wider context than long-distance makes possible.

2. Assuming you pick from within your social circle and not random bar hookups, you probably have at least a few friends in common who can vet the match.

3. Corollary to 2, if you're single and lucky, sometimes friends might play matchmaker, and mutual friends are the best "love algorithm" because they actually know you and give a shit.

This is of course on top of avoiding all the dark patterns the dating monopoly inflicts upon its users.

I can only imagine what this would be like - (he/him/vim) in profiles?

That's part of the pandemic that surprised me. Remote work tools have gotten a lot better, which was to be expected. But remote dating tools have not.

We'll need a more specialist site for people who are into BSDSM.

Don't use tinder.

There's multiple upsides: you don't become another slab of beef in the meat market. You don't get profiled and that profile sold. You can't be a target for mockery on Reddit/FB/etc.

I mean, I get it, sex is fun. But it's never required an app.

There is mostly no competitor to Tinder, as the Match group (who owns Tinder) is trying to buy any dating app that gain significant usage. The only big one resisting is Bumble, which is owned by Badoo.

From the link:

"We do not sell your personal information so no opt-out choice is necessary. What this means is that we do not sell, rent, release, disclose, disseminate, make available, transfer, or otherwise communicate in any way your personal information to another company for monetary or other valuable consideration'

I'm.not sure why the title says they sell it if the document specifically say they don't.

Perhaps “inferences” (from the document) aren’t personal information, so aren’t covered by that language.

This is correct, they explicitly use the term "share" and say they do not sell it.

They're not selling the personal information, but would they not sell inferences and estimations about certain traits?

Even anonymized inferences are relatively useless without the personal identifiers attached to it.

> otherwise communicate in any way your personal information to another company for monetary or other valuable consideration

so technically they could share the data for a jar of horse urine?

Well they already know I'm not that smart, since I'm on there in the first place.

At the risk of sounding like the usual HN snobs, I doubt anyone frequenting this site is below average intelligence.

I think precisely half of us are.

lol. Well at least one of us is I guess... So point taken.

Come on, the HN snobbery is annoying but so is this reverse snobbery/false modesty.

I can't help but raise the fact that you've probably conflated mean and median here, although I admit that I've never looked into the shape of the distribution of human intelligence.

Well, at least we know where I fall on the spectrum.

But I was mostly making a reference to this Carlin bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rh6qqsmxNs

You haven't met me ;)

I assume Tinder and the like is doing every shady thing possible to profit off users, but what seems especially gross about this is that they apparently dont limit this to users of their service, but also people applying to work at Tinder? Big YIKES, extra gross.

I would hope not, I would assume the GDPR includes all info collected, including that on an application - so it would be included in that information - doesn't necessarily mean they would.

but wouldn't surprise me one bit

That seems like the implication. Obviously they have to collect all that information for an applicant, and they explicitly state "Managing our career opportunities" as a potential use of the collected data.

That happened to me. I received a job offer at their Paris office through a "swipe right if you want to work for Tinder"

GDPR doesn’t apply to most of the world, though.

GDPR applies to companies doing business in EU. Pretty sure that Tinder has to follow EU rules given that they receive euros, albeit indirectly.

GDPR only matters if it's enforced. So far, even blatantly obvious breaches like what Facebook and Google are doing (with their analytics, non-compliant consent prompts, refusal to provide all data in response to subjects' access requests in the case of Facebook, etc) are yet to be punished so there's absolutely no reason for them to worry that a data protection agency is suddenly going to spend time & money examining a very narrow edge-case.

I think you're using an overly broad interpretation of GDPR here. When Tinder/Match, which is a US company, processes the PII of US citizens, there is no federal law that is in effect. Of course if you live in CA you have CCPA to be concerned with, and Brazil now has a law as well, the LGPD.

One thing I would like to have an answer:

The dating app market is filled with anti competitive practices and the dating app market objective is opposite to the objective of its paying users.

But you will never see anyone who has worked at Tinder telling the world what is going on inside this company, not even anonymously, which is weird, how can Tinder buy the silence of its employees ?

These things are fostered by open culture. Tinder is big but I doubt Tinder engineering is very big, in smaller companies people tend to drink the kool-aid more.

Also, while Tinder's objective is opposite of its paying users. It doesn't mean they have to enable any special thing for it.

I wonder how they monetize my strategy. I just use the same 6 message script and essentially funnel everyone the same way to text message and off of tinder.

I have had success with this strategy as well. The more time they spend on tinder the more chances they will match with someone more attractive than you and lose interest. The goal is to get a direct line as soon as you can and chat through that (text, IG, WhatsApp, etc)

It's a numbers game (or at least I can treat it that way), they follow my funnel or they get lost, I don't think twice about it.

It's like 6 messages to text and then another 6 on text/whatsapp to figure out if the logistics for a date will work.

Maybe 15-20% actually make it to a date from a number in tinder but it requires the least investment on my part.

Two thoughts:

Even if all users read the fine print, this would probably dissuade <1% of users.

Wish there was a "standard" way to read and view TOS, privacy policies etc... It would start with boiler plate and what is typically expected. It would highlight deviations from the norm. and it would be in plain english and in a large point font.

>"standard" way to read and view TOS, privacy policies etc.

GDPR, pretty much

https://privacyspy.org/

So what Apple is doing with privacy cards in the App Store. Can’t get any more simple than that. I wish they could paint in red things like “shares your data with others”

The problem with that is you'd need healthy competition that does not violate privacy for that information to be valuable, otherwise what good is it if you don't have a choice anyway because all of the apps tick all the potential privacy-violation checkboxes?

That is the least of their shady things, there is a nice video-essay exploring the economics of tinder by Ordinary Things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnLpylrZ028

Or here : https://marker.medium.com/what-i-learned-about-the-business-...

I always wonder who is the buyer of this kind of information. I think the terms with the buyer will be that the buyer can't spam the participant, so I guess the only benefit will be if buyer can correlate with other advertisement profile and will be someone like some big contextual advertising company. Even for them, correlating say 1% of the users and maybe increasing their CTR by few percent is worth going this much huddle. All I know is most of the ads that I see sucks and there is likely much more easier to fix that than hoping tinder have my data on intelligence and would use that.

I was handwritting some personal notes on negative experiences with Tinder and boom! Tinder appears on the front page of HN. Is the iPhone lying next to the notebook wired to my brain and reading hand movements?

I read this and thought, "There's a new dating app called boom?"...

This might be an app that needs to happen.

Funny that you mention this. Sometimes I'm stuck on a particular issue or merely thinking about a topic.

And HN delivers :)

Almost like observational studies are highly suspect / subject to confirmation bias.

Anyone have any ideas how they might have technically 'extrapolated estimates' of intelligence? Would they have used a language-based metric like 'idea density'? Or is there another aspect to this? Would love to hear from someone with psychometric and/or data sci experience. It's very dystopian but I am curious how something like this is even possible

Out of curiosity do theses things come about as a result of trying to monetize and not by initial design or do these companies actually intend to turn into a data-mining platform from the get go? I assume the former but I wouldn't be surprised of the latter.

The more rejection ==> the smarter you are

i feel smart now ==> thx, lol too

If they were so smart, then surely they'd figure out a way not to get rejected.

Who wants to waste his time rejecting people? Not getting rejected is a bad goal if you deal with the internet, just ask the Nigerian princes or the women on Tinder.

"Mr Lanzone -- we're about to get a flurry of negative press about our shady business practices!"

"Quick! Call down to People Ops -- lets expand our D&I business operation. Put out a presser on how we are donating to the BIPOC project!"

Anyone who has used Tinder for 5 minutes knows there's very little to estimate for most users

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