How Safe is Online Dating? Data Privacy in Dating Apps

Online dating has become a common way for individuals to make connections and build romantic relationships, but is not without data privacy concerns. Stanford conducted a study that found almost 39% of U.S. adults met through online dating. With the pandemic, the number of individuals using online dating apps and services has drastically increased. In March of 2020, there were 14.3 million average daily users on dating apps, in July of 2021, that number increased by 1 million. With that many people actively engaged on these apps, the question becomes, how safe is a user’s personal data that’s collected through these sites?

A Wealth of Data Collected

The very nature of dating sites is for users to share personal information to find the best matches. The most common information that people share on these sites include:

• Photos of themselves
• Gender
• Sexual orientation
• Age
• If they have children
• Hobbies and interests
• Religious beliefs
• Racial and ethnic background
• Occupation
• Height
• Political affiliation

But are they collecting too much data? According to Pew Research, almost six-in-ten online daters in the U.S. are concerned about data collection from these sites and apps and just over half understand why the data is collected. While these apps have complex algorithms helping individuals find love, they still pose a risk to data privacy. In 2020, white hat hackers tested the vulnerability of OkCupid and were able to get all the data of multiple profiles. Their findings helped OkCupid fix the vulnerability, but that was just one of many apps. Cybersecurity firm Wizcase discovered that several U.S. and East Asia dating apps were leaking millions of records due to misconfigured databases. In Mozilla’s latest “Privacy Not Included” report, of 24 dating apps reviewed, they found only 4 protected a user’s privacy well.

The amount of data collected is one thing. The length of time that data is stored is another. While the EU has taken some safeguards in protecting outdated data through the GDPR, the U.S. has not adopted wide sweeping legislation to limit data storage. One of the most famous online dating site hacks in the last decade illustrates the impact of sites holding old data. Ashley Madison was hacked in 2015 and over 32 million users’ data was leaked, spanning seven years.

Dating Apps and Social Media

When signing up for an online dating service, most offer easy single sign-on options by connecting with the user’s favorite social media platform. While the ease of use may seem like a benefit to the user, this opens a connection to data on that social media profile. In some cases, users can even have their social media profiles synced with the dating app, allowing personal information like images to automatically load in on their dating profile. Depending on a user’s privacy settings, they could be vulnerable to others getting access to information on their social media profiles that they had no intention of sharing on the dating app.

Sharing of Personal Data

Smartphones offer a wide range of tools to improve our everyday lives. One tool that poses a threat to security is the screenshot feature. Dating app users can easily screenshot profiles and private conversations to share with friends, or worse, post online. The user whose profile is being captured in these images may be none the wiser of what data is being shared.

Another way data can be shared is through the selling or sharing of users’ data to third parties or via APIs. Connecting social media sites or using a dating app that has many affiliates (Match Group LLC owns 45 dating sites) opens your data up to being shared and used for purposes beyond matchmaking (such as retargeted marketing campaigns). Users utilizing services that monitor and automatically remove sensitive information online, like IDX’s ForgetMe service, reduce the risk of data being sold for profits.

The Future of Dating Apps

Dating apps are here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. These companies can do a lot to help protect their users’ data.

Things that would make online dating apps safer include:

• Making photo blurring of profile pictures standard for both free and paid accounts, so individuals not logged into an account cannot see users’ pictures
• Better onboarding processes that teach users data sharing best practices and how to be safe while online dating
• Enable users to take more control over the data collected as well as how long it’s stored
• Not requiring geolocation services while using the app

Online dating companies can also step-up their security measures by investing in custom privacy solutions that help protect their customer’s data from threats, such as the IDX platform. SocialSentry would protect users’ social media connections by scanning for malicious content, scams, account takeovers, and more. It would provide peace of mind while still offering the ease of social media based single sign-on. Going even further for data protection, the IDX CyberScan technology will monitor more than 14 billion data points across the entire web (dark web included), to identify any compromised data for the user. With powerful data privacy tools like these, users sharing data on dating apps can find love, not risk.