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Comment by barbariangrunge | Hacker News Reader

Can’t wait to see all our old private messages get leaked by some hack of the parent organization now too. Or for it all to just get sold to advertisers

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I wish! After I met my (now-)wife on OkCupid, we deactivated our accounts so that we'd stop getting notifications. A few months later we wanted to revisit our first messages to each other -- only to find that OkC had already deleted them. I was pretty shocked at how eager they were to discard a few KB of potentially priceless ASCII. :(

On the other hand, deleting potentially compromising stuff once it is no longer needed is really good for former clients' privacy. In case of a hack, no one will be able to dig in decades of old erotic penmanship and blackmail people.

I can't speak specifically to this case, but it's certainly not about saving KB, it's usually specifically to prevent people from messaging the same person multiple times a year for many months/years.

IIRC, OkC also removed the ability to bookmark profiles, presumably for the same reason -- everything moving to a more "ephermeral" experience to prevent anybody getting "obsessed" with certain accounts because of how creepy that gets. Since spam, stalking, and abusive messages are by far the #1 problem with any online dating service. (Yes blocking works, but it's even better when people don't have to block in the first place. If you have to block too much, you quit the app.)

I’m engaged now, and met my fiancée on a dating site. At the time, it made sense that I deleted my account, since we were exclusive, but now those first messages exist only as a memory. I’d love to have those again, but I’m happy that data is gone.

I had the foresight to screenshot the convo between my soon-to-be-fiancée before deleting my account. :)

Luckily I was able to dump the SQLite db that Tinder used in the past when I met my SO

That probably makes sense, but I'm sad to find that out. I've been thinking of logging back in to see if I could read the first few messages between myself and my recently-deceased fiancée. But those were years ago and I'm sure they're gone.

Sorry buddy

Just because the enduser doesn't see the data anymore, doesn't mean the company doesn't have/use them anymore.

Match lets third parties access the extremely personal/private matching question answers from OKCupid.

Presumably this means advertisers.

I used OKC for years until the founders sold it (and my private data) to this shady company, then I was forced to delete.

Acquisitions are worse than breaches for end user privacy. GitHub sold your whole travel history (via client IP geolocation) to Microsoft.

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