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When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

theguardian.com

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Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#81

Post by sanxiyn »

emodendroket wrote: post #68
zokier wrote: post #35

I think Tinder specifically has far better grounds for having all this data than most tech companies. After all it is their core function to try to match people, and to do that well you need to know the people.

I wouldn't go so far as to say they need all this data. The service could work fine with just self-reported preferences and profiles if you wanted it to.

There is actually lots of business value in this data. One research https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5710 found:

"There is significant discrepancy between a user's stated dating preference and his/her actual online dating behavior." For how much discrepancy, read the paper.

Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#82

Post by adrian1973 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #79
adrian1973 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sucks that you are probably correct. My own biggest issue with data retention is not that these companies collect all this data (they need to for their business models to work) but that they keep all of it, forever, regardless of whether it could possibly still be relevant to any business purpose (such as chat conversions from a decade ago).

I actually think chat conversation from a decade ago would be quite relevant. One baseline recommendation system is "people who bought X also bought Y". Consider "people whose conversation is in cluster X generally liked people in cluster Y". If chat conversation can be usefully used to cluster users for better matching (and I think it can), it would be valuable to keep even if content is of no interest.

> even if content is of no interest.

Can't they just keep (at most) the metadata?

Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#83

Post by sanxiyn »

adrian1973 wrote: post #82
sanxiyn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think chat conversation from a decade ago would be quite relevant. One baseline recommendation system is "people who bought X also bought Y". Consider "people whose conversation is in cluster X generally liked people in cluster Y". If chat conversation can be usefully used to cluster users for better matching (and I think it can), it would be valuable to keep even if content is of no interest.

> even if content is of no interest. Can't they just keep (at most) the metadata?

As a data scientist, I think losing actual words would be a loss. Words would be only used by word embeddings like word2vec, but actual words let you switch to better word embedding later.

Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#84

Post by sanxiyn »

emodendroket wrote: post #69
ronnier wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rumor is that snap keeps messages in google cloud compute encrypted. When messages are expired or read by the user, they just delete the encryption key.

Why would they do that? Keeping around a bunch of blobs nobody can decrypt seems like a huge waste of resources.

I suspect the same reason PostgreSQL has VACUUM. Immediate deletion can be expensive, and deletion can be cheaper if done in batch. On the other hand, they want to make it immediately unreadable. Deleting key seems to be a good way to make something immediately unreadable while avoiding expensive immediate deletion.

Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#85

Post by emodendroket »

throw-away-8 wrote: post #78
emodendroket wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't go so far as to say they need all this data. The service could work fine with just self-reported preferences and profiles if you wanted it to.

Self-reported preferences and experimentally observed preferences are not the same.

I agree, but I don't know that that is such an impediment that the app wouldn't be usable.

Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#86

Post by emodendroket »

sanxiyn wrote: post #84
emodendroket wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they do that? Keeping around a bunch of blobs nobody can decrypt seems like a huge waste of resources.

I suspect the same reason PostgreSQL has VACUUM. Immediate deletion can be expensive, and deletion can be cheaper if done in batch. On the other hand, they want to make it immediately unreadable. Deleting key seems to be a good way to make something immediately unreadable while avoiding expensive immediate deletion.

OK, yeah, if we're talking about some sort of tombstone operation I get it; I thought the claim was the nefarious overlords of Snapchat were keeping the data around, which was harder to understand.

Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#87

Post by emodendroket »

thunderman10 wrote: post #80
teetermld wrote: post #65

880 matches holy shit, that has to be 8x as much as the average guy. Life must be so easy.

That's around 220 matches a year since shes had the app, so like 18 matches per month for four years... She matched with a new guy every two days basically, and he mentioned she only sent 1700 messages since she started. That's almost two average messages per match before getting bored and moving on. With that much abundance of choice, I guess you could say life is nice and easy for the author.

Well, you could say that, but is it true? Perhaps the post-match experience isn't necessarily very good, and anyway I'm not sure raw quantity maximizes anything normal people care about.

Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#88

Post by zoltaan »

emodendroket wrote: post #66
zoltaan wrote: post #27

I always felt a bit silly logging in to Facebook in a private browser window in every other week, many times through a VPN. Also not sharing much more than jokes and cartoons or memes. Not to mention my absense from the hip social web, including Tinder, but many more as well. I don't feel silly anymore. :) (btw: my name is not zoltaan ;) )

Hopefully you also don't have any friends.

On the web? No, not much. :)

Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#89

Post by dagenleg »

pnutjam wrote: post #58
pls2halp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immigrants have lower IQs or more criminality. Assuming a reasonable portion of these are refugees(or from third world countries), wouldn’t that be a fair link to make? Malnutrition has a clearly established link to lower IQs, hence migrants having a lowe IQ(iirc, Nordic countries have the Flynn effect strongest, so this link might hold true even for immigrants from developed nations).

I'm loath to go down this rabbit hole, but wouldn't you also assume that migrants are the most tenacious and smartest, since they managed to survive huge changes, go somewhere new, and try to build something? It seems like migrants are self selecting for smarter people, although IQ tests are notoriously slanted by cultural expectations an societal norms and seem to be a poor method of measuring this.

I also don't like rabbit holes, but tenacity and smartness are really not the same thing.

Re: When I asked Tinder for my data, it sent me 800 pages of my deepest secrets

#90

Post by doktrin »

zokier wrote: post #35

I think Tinder specifically has far better grounds for having all this data than most tech companies. After all it is their core function to try to match people, and to do that well you need to know the people.

In theory, sure. In practice, Tinder seems to be a pretty blunt dating instrument. I'd be surprised if A / B testing a data-driven vs. non-data-driven match would yield significantly different user experiences.
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