FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
> Even though it did not have any business relationship with OkCupid, the third-party data recipient asked the company to share large datasets of OkCupid user photos and related data with it because OkCupid’s founders were financial investors in the third party. OkCupid provided the third party with access to nearly three million OkCupid user photos as well as location and other information without placing any formal or contractual restrictions on how the information could be used, the FTC alleged.
I wonder what is this third party that the complaint does not list by name?
Reuters says it is "Clarifai" if you wanted to know.
https://www.reuters.com/world/match-group-settles-us-ftc-cla...
I'm not sure privacy violations are the biggest concern here.
Clarifai's usecase is around unstructured image data search which is fairly useful in cleansing and less so in targeting.
More fundamentally, almost the entire tech industry touched Project Maven - it was massive. And that was just 1 of multiple initiatives led by the DoD.
And most other great and regional powers like China, Russia, Japan, France, India, South Korea, Turkiye, etc have all been working on similar projects for a decade.
It doesn't matter what country you live in - no nation will leave capabilities on the table. Heck, a highschooler with knowledge of OpenCV and the Google Earth API can build targeting capabilities similar to what superpowers had a decade ago.
It's 2026 - the Ukraine War started in 2014; the Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni Civil Wars in 2011; the Congo War reignited in 2015; the Afghan War continued until 2022; the Myanmar Civil War reignited in 2021; etc - there has now been over a decade of constant development of dual use technologies in both conflicts and civilian applications.
Technology has always had a military component - heck, much of the "civilian" technologies in the 1990s-2000s were refined and tested thanks to Gulf War 1 and the Yugoslav Wars.
Or, framed in another manner - the capabilities disclosed as part of the Snowden Leaks in 2013 were already in production 20 years ago. It is 2026.
There is a sense of starry-eyed idealism amongst a subset of techies who didn't seem to realize that technology has always been dual use.
Outstanding observation! Class action suit in the making. Only lawyers get rich, but still could hurt the offenders financially.
You welcome :)
It's basically required for those apps to function. No platform would exist very long if users could upload content and then sue the platform for hosting it.
The agreements usually include a clause about allowing them to sub-license it.
So you still retain the copyright to the photos, but you can't sue them for using it.
"In September 2014, the CEO of Clarifai, Inc. e-mailed one of OkCupid’s founders requesting that Humor Rainbow give Clarifai, Inc. (i.e., the Data Recipient) access to large datasets of OkCupid photos."
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/OkCupid-MatchCo...
And apparently also your deodorant, Assassin's Creed, and tabloid rags as well. That's what I call variety.
sooo, why are they after some dating profile pics if the model was about “identifying and labeling pictures”? You can safely assume their new model will be (already) trained on your pictures to crosscheck you on other platforms or surveillance system, coupled with accurate positioning, you can guess the rest.
I signed up for eHarmony with a unique email address dedicated to that site. After wasting 6 months, I chose to delete my account.
Lo and behold, soon spam started to show up on this account, as if the floodgates had been opened. It was a unique account that I had not used anywhere else just for this specific reason, and my hunch was justified.
Surprised it took this long to get litigation. So many people complaining about how crap dating sites are, but no one thought to realize the site itself was the problem and fell into the whole "looksmaxxing" grift. Some people really will do anything except admit that rich people are corrupt.
On a traditional (social) network, whether that'd be Facebook, the railroad or the Bloomberg Terminal, you have the network effect. The more users you get, the more interesting the network becomes, which means yet more users want to join. This is a positive feedback loop.
The entire point of a dating site is to find somebody to leave that site with. Statistically speaking (and at that scale, statistics is the only thing that matters), attractive users[1] are more likely to find a match and leave, while unattractive users are likely to stay (or come back) and keep looking. As time goes on, the fraction of unattractive users will keep increasing. You can fix this with enough growth, but exponential growth can't go on forever due to population size constraints. And once you get into that state, your growth will be constrained further, which just puts you onto a downward slide into hell.
And then there's the question of revenue. It's hard to scalably do deals where the user must pay you when they find a relationship on the site (like the matchmaking services of old used to do), so subscriptions or one-time fees are your only options. Neither of them are great, subscriptions encourage you to keep users on the site (which puts your goal opposite to what the users want), one-time fees work against the network effect and constrain growth.
[1] By "attractiveness", I mean something much wider than just visual / physical attractiveness. An ability to enter and maintain a successful long-term relationship in general.
Many people on dating apps are not looking for exclusive or long-term relationships.
Lo and behold, soon spam started to show up on this account, as if the floodgates had been opened.
Facebook is also guilty of this.
I set up a Facebook account for a relative around 2006. The e-mail address is name_facebook@ a domain that I control.
Every six months or so, Facebook will send out almost daily e-mails for a month saying "Person x commented on your post!" or some variant. You know how I know this relative of mine didn't make a new post?
He's been dead since 2011.
Especially people who were at his funeral.
> The FTC said OkCupid users were never told their information - including nearly 3 million photos, demographic information and location data - would be shared in 2014 with Clarifai, a facial recognition technology company, contrary to OkCupid's privacy policies.
When I signed up for Match, about ten minutes into the process my account suddenly changed to that of another man including different photo, descriptions, orientation etc. I don't know why this happened but it was absolutely mortifying and an outrage Match did this. I dread to think how shit their code has to be to somehow merge accounts or whatever happened. I deleted "my" account immediately.
I imagine that counts as excessive sharing of personal data.
I've been out of the dating scene for 16 years now, but based on what I see on social media, I think online dating sucks today for three reasons.
1. Many men (Not all, but many) are there simply because they want to get laid. They're not looking for a relationship, they're looking for a hook-up, and they're not honest about their intentions. It doesn't help that people argue over whether Tinder is a dating app or a hook-up app.
2. I'm not sure how to put this without seeming misogynistic, but some women greatly over-value themselves. Or at the very least, they have out-dated ideas of courtship. Some of them expect to be taken out to $50+/plate restaurants on a first date, while many men think women are just trying to score free meals. It's hard to make relationships kick off when they begin so adversarial.
3. Dating sites/apps have a financial incentive for your relationship to fail. They can give you matches they know are bad since it keeps you as a serial dater and on their app. They're in a sticky spot where their most successful customer is one that they will never see another dime from, and there's not really a way around it.
the definition requires "contempt", but it has been diluted to mean any statement that merely points out of corrosive behavior
additionally, many of the statements are actually class based and not inherently gendered, for example, we would call out a man trying to date for free meals too, but since its seen in contexts about women, its stated in reference to that gender, masquerading as contempt and misogyny, but not highlighting what is in the observer's heart and mind whatsoever.
so are many women, unnecessarily gendered observation
you just hear less about guys crashing out over it
In fairness, this is not at all exclusive to online dating.
Hrm...
My experience with OKCupid was that women must lie to get laid, moreso than men. A man can state "just want sex" on his profile and it is socially neutral. A woman who posts such a thing has social consequences.
If you don’t want to spend that every first date, then I would suggest not making dinner the first date. Do something more casual first time around. Bar, coffee/walk, whatever.
> Do something more casual first time around. Bar, coffee/walk, whatever.
The problem with that is there are women that will scoff at a man trying to do something casual like coffee, tea, or ice cream for a first date. They want to be wined and dined and treated like a princess right off the bat. They think they're a prize to be won simply by being a woman.
Though I truly believe that most women are not like this. However, some are, and their attitude is probably what keeps them perpetually single.
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If the idea of a causal first date appeals to you, but not to the other party, you probably aren't a good match. Swipe left and find somebody else.
You clearly think it’s poor behavior so why are you worried about striking out with them?
You're using the casual meeting as a filter for certain personalities.
There are plenty of people out there who prefer a more formalized approach to dating, and good for them. You have a different preference. Being selective is good because it saves both of you time and there are no hard feelings.
> They want to be wined and dined and treated like a princess right off the bat. They think they're a prize to be won simply by being a woman.
Thinking about people you aren't interested in will just grind your gears.
Let them live their lives. I guarantee you they are not dying alone or whatever mortal curse you wish to invoke.
I'm also not casting a curse on anyone, you misunderstood. I'm not saying I'm better than them so this doesn't happen to me. No, it also happens to me.
Because this is by design. This is systemic. The apps are designed in such a way to make your expectations unrealistic and thereby perpetually let you down, because that's how you continue to use the app!
I can tell you from experience that it's a lot scarier to date men.
The point is really that there's an expectation mismatch around costs that shrinks everyone's pool of daters.
For actual numbers in Canada, the Globe and Mail recently commissioned a survey showing about 47% of singles would not be willing to spend more than 50 CAD (36 usd) on a first date - and that 24% of singles think the man should pay, compared to 0.2% of singles thinking the woman should pay. So you can see the mismatch if you think about the Venn diagrams there.
Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-is-canada-facin...
naive question: why has no one made an app with the reverse incentive structure? i understand that the current business model is much more lucrative...but i feel like with how fed up people are with the inability of modern online dating to provide quality, long-lasting relationships a new platform that optimizes for match quality and longevity would eat all of Match Groups offerings lunches. i guess there just isn't enough money to be made so it's not even worth it?
1. Network effects. An app isn't like a new local business where people will naturally wander in. They may already exist but the market's captured everyone on the skinner box services
2. App stores. The deeper you look into the things needed to advertise as a mobile app, the more obvious it becomes. You need milliions up front just to be featured in your critical launch time. If you don't, you fall into #1 and it's hard to recover from the "it's so empty" early impressions.
3. As you said, any success despite #1 and #2 is destined to fail. ad won't make that money up, so the only viable idea is relying on a premium or subscription model. But paid models in the era of "free" mobile apps is a hard sell unless you can guarantee success. And dating is anything but guaranteed.
That said other models have been tried to correct the issues with the big apps. Limiting matches, reversing the gender dynamics, based around special interests, etc. The only one I think I saw any kind of success from is one tailored towards rich/famous people meeting other rich/famous people (surprise, surprise).
You've identified the problem but failed to adequately describe a solution.
The matchmakers need to make money, even to just pay for the costs of running the service.
A monthly subscription to use the service creates the perverse incentive to give bad matches. A one-time fee makes unsuccessful users feel cheated out of their money. A "pay us once you get married" option is ripe for abuse.
Even if the service is free and paid for by selling ads, you'd run into the same problem of the subscription model: They'd be incentivized to keep you perpetually single so you see more ads.
Now when I meet somebody through the service, and we think it's serious, we can release that money. And we can check whether the other did too!
Sure there will still be profiles with people that don't pledge, because they're just testing the waters, or poor, or scammers. Whatever. Point is I can send a signal that at some point I want to be done with the service, and then pay them for that.
They used to have a sister site. They had these kind of hilarious animated ads that made the whole thing seem so logical. One ad targeted at women and the other at men, both claiming that money meant you only got serious requests. I wish I could find those ads, they were classic.
--
Found one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFo-da_2rdI
--
Found the other: https://vimeo.com/21179683
If you get married, there should be a "what app did you meet on" question on the marriage application. Apps should get $10/month for each relationship they create, for as long as the partners live or until they get divorced.
This would encourage app makers to "get rid" of their users as fast as possible, getting them into successful, long-term relationships, instead of keeping them on the apps for as long as possible to milk subscription revenue.
Considering the fertility crisis that most western countries are facing, this is overwhelmingly likely to be long-term revenue-positive for governments.
Honestly, that's fine. The issue was when the "get laid" app suddenly decided to be the "find serious relationship" app. Makes about as much sense as Roblox thinking about a dating app, but I guess the MBA's told them it brings more monies.
> but some women greatly over-value themselves.
It's overblown, but the high level concept of "women are picky" the inevitable course of nearly all dating aspects. Evolutionary wise, women need to be picky due to their long gestation period, and men aren't as picky because they can copulate with dozens of women over the course of days. Add in a caste system and the pareto principle, and even scenes from millenia ago aren't as different from 2026 Tinder as you'd think.
But of course your last point only polarizes this existing natural phenomenon.
>Dating sites/apps have a financial incentive for your relationship to fail.
This is why we needed to litigate these sites yesterday. But we were too busy fighting amongst ourselves, like serfs warring in the streets while the kings sit in an ivory tower. This is an issue only regulation can fix. The human element shouln't be sold off to capitalism, especially in this time where people are supposedly concerned about falling birth rates.
> Puts a disclaimer before criticizing pathological behavior of some women
Nothing will improve until we as men stop gatekeeping ourselves from stating facts openly, without apologies. Women can be very shitty, often are, and that has to be said without the need to preface it or soften the blow.
> Some women ... expect to be taken out to $50+/plate restaurants on a first date, ... women are just trying to score free meals
> It's hard to make relationships kick off when they begin so adversarial.
I think you're letting a judgmental and expectant point of view toward certain women on the apps cloud over a very real problem of why the apps are not very useful for finding relationships. The basis of which is our expectations of how we want others to be and when they are not, they are the problem (justified or not) -- that then morphs into a cascading sequence of issues, if engaged with, on repeat.
That these particular women, who have expectations, at least say so -- up front. Yet comparing that with men are "not honest about their intentions" (expectations).
How is a woman looking for an actual relationship suppose to work with dishonesty? Men looking for an actual relationship can steer clear of that impending disaster.
I can ignore someone who declares their expectations, which I find off-putting. And if they don't declare it but expect a mindreader and they instead get a coffee, well I'm out a coffee and thankfully they showed who they were early and I move on. Their loss, not mine. On the other hand, if my date was stringing me along and lying about what they wanted until I was deceived enough into handing over what that actually was -- that's a far more consequential loss than a $4 cup of coffee. We should want everyone to clearly state what they want and expect, without the judgements, then everyone (with proper intentions) would benefit.
social media i.e especially instagram has caused women / men etc to curate this idea of themselves that doesn't match to reality.
hence every activity / date etc has to worth an insta moment.
whether you meet initially in person or online - the problem remains - pretense.
no one wants to be shit-shovler(working non-glamorous jobs), home-idler anymore or to be seen as bland / boring which 90% of people are.
Did I miss it, or were there no other parts to this settlement mentioned?
In other words: no punishment at all.
Because everyone else is "allowed" to misrepresent its privacy policies.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/facebook-agrees-pay-...
I can tell you with absolute certainty from working in the industry a decade ago that the entire business model revolves around fake female profiles and dark UX patterns (lies) to trick lonely men. I can vividly remember that it was this big open secret that we all had to dance around all the time, pretending our product was legitimate and helping people. It's literally the only viable model for dating apps and sites; anyone who is actually successful at using them stops paying. I have no doubt the big apps are using their own LLM bots at this point.
> We invest $125 million annually in trust and safety teams, features and initiatives to help prevent and disrupt potential harm on and off our platforms. As we outlined in our Impact Report, we remain focused on several areas, including safety policy, features, social advocacy, law enforcement operations and outreach, and safety by design.
from:
https://mtch.com/single-news/922/#:~:text=We%20invest%20$125...
"Americans are losing at least $119 billion every year to scams, according to a new estimate from the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America, a consumer advocacy group."
from:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/scam-cost-price-money-...
Tangent:
I was a "pickup artist" (2005-2010). Most of it is creepy bullshit, but the process teaches you a powerful aspect of hookup-style dating (as opposed to courting for a long-term relationship): guys need to be ok with embarrassing themselves.
I'm sure there are ways to optimize online dating, but the SNR was always bad, and it only seems to get worse.
So yea I'm encouraging guys (or whatever the current term is for the one that takes the initiative) to work thru rejection.
Of course, it's not that simple. If you simply memorize interactions that have been posted online, you'll quickly find yourself subtly outed as a weirdo.
But that feeling of rejection is important. That's how your mind+body learns in real time. It's much harder for some of us that didn't quite socialize properly at younger ages (often due to horrible things like broken families, bullies, etc).
And there are of course lighter approaches (what i described earlier often occurs within bars/nightclubs) within more casual groups that may involve more introverts.
However, if you can get over rejection (and certainly pace it; don't be a sociopath) it will dramatically accelerate so many things (many of which do lead back to dating), and you can avoid these scammy dating sites altogether (I personally find 100% guarantees like this very compelling and will regularly consider if I can can just completely avoid entire classes of stuff).
I’m in my mid forties now and frankly don’t have the energy and metal capacity to play The Game. It’s only gotten much worse (most dramatic for westerns) for more traditional and “old fashioned” men to find partners. We can thank instagram, snapchat, tiktok and perhaps most negatively onlyfans. I have traveled allover the world and find South American women still have a feminine mindset and want to genuinely settle down and start a family. Again more traditional; I assume because faith and family are such strong forces down south.
Some may read my comment as “toxic masculinity” or whatever buzzword of the day is used to shame and emasculate men, but clearly something is broken with western and asian civilizations as marriage and birth rates are plummeting.
A girl I knew told me it wasn't any fun when the guy would just do whatever to please her. She found it boring and uninteresting. Rather she enjoyed the chase, so to speak, and said she wanted to work for it.
I assume there's some variance, but I kept that in the back of my mind.
First, nearly every western girl goes thru a "hoe" phase. This is when they're figuring themselves out. And we go thru this phase too obviously, but we still have this double-standard nonsense which blinds us to what a woman really is, so I have to call it out.
Second, you have to be cool with this. This is the importance of rejection experience. You need to go thru it, know that you're alright, and that calm goes sooo far in getting you laid/married.
Everyone makes mistakes. It doesn't help if you're visibly uncomfortable because of a mistake she made a while back. To be clear, the mistake I speak of is sleeping with shitty guys during her learning phase ("the chase").
But I like The Game and the whole pickup artist thing because it breaks down the mechanics in a way that I think is more accessible to "nerds".
The bar/nightclub excursions compress social dynamics from weeks/months to hours. It's very instructive for dating and business/job-hunting.
But the endgame is even more important. I know of at least 5 couples that started off playing the game around each other, and later married. Attractive people, just too busy banging all the other attractive friends (yea, San Francisco lol).
This is just one expression among the vicissitudes of social expression, but don't forget the fact it is also very much a numbers game (when zoomed out far enough).
That said, I think finding a wife in countries that tend more traditional is a great approach.
I've seen it work over and over. In one striking case, there was also very high mutual appreciation, from the guy for her traditional qualities, and from the girl for his pragmatism and diligence.
never heard or thought about this before, but it kind of makes sense for a dating app. its one of the only levers available to them to attempt any sort of balance between user genders. it sucks for everyone (including the users) if the male:female ratio is like 20:1 or whatever.
i would rather pay a couple of extra dollars, relative to the opposite sex, if it meant access to a wider pool of potential matches.
whatever more accurate numbers you want to substitute in there is fine, the point remains the same.
To be more explicit: you're paying extra to give more porn bots access to your inbox.
No idea how these businesses operate now. I'm sure there's still sliding scales of sliminess based on the quality of the club and its management.
(Sincere question, not snark)
Proposed settlement: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/MatchGroupAmeri...
Google ? Meta ? Microsoft ? Oh, i see, they pay well.
Was surprised to find it was Match and OkCupid and not Tinder/Grindr
"the odds are good, but the goods are odd" may apply here
I think the "only thing" that would make me cherry-pickable from their data is that I used an autoclicker to give everyone a 5 star... I have mixed feelings about doing that, but I got a couple (surprisingly nice) dates out of it that never went anywhere.
[1] https://blog.photofeeler.com/okcupid-is-wrong-about-smiling-...
They were heavily involved in researching what factors more reliably led to not just better matches, but better relationships -- when you disabled your account, they'd ask if it was because you'd met someone through OkC and ask you to pick who, if you were willing to share.
I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale. Trying to understand what messaging strategies worked better or worse could be a major part of figuring out how to improve matches.
Like, one obvious factor could be to match people who send lots of long messages with lots of questions with each other, while a separate set matches people who's messaging style is one sentence at a time. I'm not saying that would necessarily work well, but it's not crazy to research if NLP analysis of messages can produce additional potential compatibility signals.
The whole point of OkC back then was to try to develop as many data-based signals as possible to improve matches.
34. In response to this request, Humor Rainbow gave the Data Recipient access to nearly three million OkCupid user photos. Humor Rainbow’s President and Chief Technology Officer were directly involved in facilitating the data transfer.
35. In addition to user photos, Humor Rainbow shared other personal data with the Data Recipient, including each user’s demographic and location information.A company running NLP on its own user data doesn't have anything to do with third parties.
I'm confused why "as long as" carries so much weight here considering the article that started this discussion. You seem to trust that they stopped their privacy fuckups with third parties. I don't know where your trust comes from.
My privacy problem exists with third parties AND internally within OkCupid. At some point, running NLP over messages necessitates that an analyst or ops person actually has to look at the underlying data at some point.
The 3rd party stuff just exudes something like a privacy "code smell" -- "orthogonality" doesn't really matter to my point because 1. these things don't exist in a vacuum and 2. stench has a way of permeating through layers, regardless of how orthogonal underwear is.
Like, do you trust that OKCupid staff didn't download user messages to their laptops?
Christian Rudder's OKTrends blog (and Sam Yagan's presentation at their acquisition celebration) even spelled out the reason why: some women on OKC (or, more rarely, men) would acquire the "Replies rarely"/red color on their profile, for almost never (<10%) replying to initial messages, which was generally considered to be undesirable behavior, even in the negative (there is value in a negative message: "Thanks but I'm not interested due to age/location/other factor". And also OKC could then measure whether users' stated preferences mismatched preferences inferred from which set of users they message e.g. people who say they're looking for 30-55 for LTR but tend to message people 21-35 for short-term). And before anyone points out that younger more attractive female profiles would get more initial messages than males (up to 200:1 more), OKC used to allow you to set filters on the other user's age/distance/other criteria, so you could automatically filter those out. Also, factor in the usual caveats that many users on dating sites tend to lie about their age/weight/height/location/status/etc.
Anyway, to avoid getting labeled the dread "Replies rarely", some (mostly female) users got in the habit of sending one-liner responses that were ambiguous/non-committal/cryptic/negging. And then not responding further (but without unmatching, which only took a single click). This was making their profile look less undesirable but generating pointless message traffic and reducing the overall utility of the platform at actually attempting to match people (for compatibility, not just initial attraction). Hence, OKC tried to actually measure initial exchanges to figure out which ones led to genuine back-and-forth conversations of 3+ messages (which is an ok proxy for inferring a match, certainly a better proxy than just counting initial messages/likes/votes on photos). Yagan jokingly referred to this as "Every Monday morning, we ask 'How many three-ways did we set up over the weekend?'"). (PS, Rudder and Yagan both stressed that users' names/identities/ identifying characteristics were kept out of the analysis.)
After the 2011 IAC acquisition, most of this platform quality control (and looking for constructive insights) went out the window pretty quickly and the three cofounders moved to OKCupid Labs. But it was good for the brief while it lasted. By 2013 a chainsaw had been taken to most of OKC's unique features, esp. for free users.
As such it wasn't "reading other people's messages". That's according to the OKC founders description of what they did, pre-acquisition. Since they were reasonably upfront about what they did, and since that functionality worked even for free users and they didn't aggressively push premium or gate the features, I believe they were being truthful. Furthermore, after the 2011 acquisition and when they stopped being active on OKC itself, there was a palpable degradation in site quality. (And post-2014, IAC went on to sell personal information about users' substance use etc. to insurers, to which users had never given informed consent).
So I think your date explained things badly and you picked up the wrong end of the stick. It's trivially easy to write a script that strips usernames and identifying information. And it's not too hard to distinguish "Hey baby" or "DTF?" from more meaningful messages. For the platform to do that with an intent to improving matches was strongly positive, not negative.
> For the platform to do that with an intent to improving matches was strongly positive, not negative.
Do you realize how much work that OkCupid has put into their product to make matching intentionally worse (through analysis!)? Take off your rose-tinted glasses!!
Edit: aaaand there's a new article about OkCupid giving facial recognition data to 3rd parties.
can we know that third party?!
>"As part of a settlement, OkCupid [...] will be prohibited from misrepresenting its privacy policies."
>"Under the proposed settlement, OkCupid and Match are permanently prohibited from misrepresenting or assisting others in misrepresenting: [...]"
every company should already be "prohibited from misrepresenting its privacy policies" and the collection/controls stuff.
12 years, including intentional obstruction of the ftc investigation, and we get "please dont do that again". (dad voice: im not surprised, just disappointed)
To be fair, the complaint only alleges one instance of data transfer, so it's unclear whether the privacy violations were actually occurring for 12 years.
Claims that they were engaging in "intentional obstruction of the ftc investigation" are also unsupported beyond the false statements they made to the media and the users. It's like if your nemesis died under mysterious circumstances, a journalist asked you whether you killed him, you said no, and it turned out you did. Is it a lie? Yeah. Could it be reasonably characterized as "intentional obstruction of police investigation"? Hardly.
i wasnt clear in my comment, but i meant it in the sense of "12 years to resolve this one incident".
>Claims that they were engaging in "intentional obstruction of the ftc investigation" are also unsupported beyond the false statements they made to the media and the users.
i am not particularly inclined to take OkCupids side here, and will default to accepting the FTCs allegation.
Yeah you're right. The part about obstructing the investigation was in the press release but I was only looking at the complaint.
So people voted for not that. Again.
IAC had owned Match.com for a while and then developed Tinder from scratch.
Match didn't buy Tinder. Tinder was always part of the same company from day one.
IAC owned both Match and HatchLabs (which developed Tinder in 2012). They were later merged into one entity, and even later spun off from IAC altogether. They were "part of the same company" in that giant mega-corp super conglomerate owned both, but practically they were fully separate entities when Tinder was created. Match didn't buy Tinder, but it was merged with Tinder by parent company, just like OkCupid was acquired by IAC and merged with Match.