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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

#101

Post by jmagoon »

doktrin wrote: post #90
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.

OKCupid ran this experiment: https://theblog.okcupid.com/we-experiment-on-human-beings-5d...

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

#102

Post by trollopTheJope »

dejawu wrote: post #97

I got fed up with Tinder's Android client and reverse-engineered their API (this was back when the Android security model let you use mitmproxy). Two things stood out to me: 1. The AI was kind of hacky. Updates were done by polling rather than push. There were a lot of unused fields - for example, "remaining likes" would hang at 100 until the likes were used up, then it would go straight to 0. 2. They tracked absolut…

is it feasible to do this protocol reverse engineering without mitmproxy?

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

#103

Post by edem »

donquichotte wrote: post #32

> A few months earlier, 70,000 profiles from OkCupid (owned by Tinder’s parent company Match Group) were made public by a Danish researcher some commentators have labelled a “white supremacist”, who used the data to try to establish a link between intelligence and religious beliefs. The guy's name is Emil Kirkegaard and the paper and data is still available. I skimmed the paper and have no idea why he was labled a "w…

Is he related somehow with Soren Kirkegaard?

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

#104

Post by majormajor »

dejawu wrote: post #97

I got fed up with Tinder's Android client and reverse-engineered their API (this was back when the Android security model let you use mitmproxy). Two things stood out to me: 1. The AI was kind of hacky. Updates were done by polling rather than push. There were a lot of unused fields - for example, "remaining likes" would hang at 100 until the likes were used up, then it would go straight to 0. 2. They tracked absolut…

> 2. They tracked absolutely every action you took and sent it to a different server from the API requests. Opening settings, opening your own profile, opening someone else's profile - it was all logged. They knew exactly what you were doing in the app and for how long.

Are there always-connected apps that don't do things like this? It's always seemed like an obvious source of usage research data that the product team isn't going to want you to forego.

A lot of apps are A/B tested for new features, I would assume this is where the results come from.

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

#105

Post by wackro »

dejawu wrote: post #97

I got fed up with Tinder's Android client and reverse-engineered their API (this was back when the Android security model let you use mitmproxy). Two things stood out to me: 1. The AI was kind of hacky. Updates were done by polling rather than push. There were a lot of unused fields - for example, "remaining likes" would hang at 100 until the likes were used up, then it would go straight to 0. 2. They tracked absolut…

Number 2 is standard. In my experience It's a form of logging more than a form of data collection.

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

#106

Post by emodendroket »

doktrin wrote: post #91
emodendroket wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The going stereotype about Tinder is that most men (all but the most attractive) match poorly while most women (all but the least attractive) match well - but that (again, most) women nonetheless experience a lack of communication post-match.

Well that makes sense since you hear about men just indiscriminately saying yes to everyone. And you also have to imagine that some of the comments are just obscene catcalls rather than attempts at conversation.

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

#107

Post by firloop »

wackro wrote: post #105
dejawu wrote: post #97

I got fed up with Tinder's Android client and reverse-engineered their API (this was back when the Android security model let you use mitmproxy). Two things stood out to me: 1. The AI was kind of hacky. Updates were done by polling rather than push. There were a lot of unused fields - for example, "remaining likes" would hang at 100 until the likes were used up, then it would go straight to 0. 2. They tracked absolut…

Number 2 is standard. In my experience It's a form of logging more than a form of data collection.

What's the difference between logging and data collection?

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

#108

Post by emodendroket »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #94
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.

Probably for the same reason your hard drive doesn't actually delete data when you tell the OS to delete it, except that in this case, if implemented correctly, the data would become truly unrecoverable immediately.

Like I said to the other guy, the comment made it sound to me like for some reason they were keeping the data forever.

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

#109

Post by sprafa »

pdehaye2 wrote: post #43
donquichotte wrote: post #32

> A few months earlier, 70,000 profiles from OkCupid (owned by Tinder’s parent company Match Group) were made public by a Danish researcher some commentators have labelled a “white supremacist”, who used the data to try to establish a link between intelligence and religious beliefs. The guy's name is Emil Kirkegaard and the paper and data is still available. I skimmed the paper and have no idea why he was labled a "w…

Hi, I am the person who is cited in the article and who helped Judith get access to her data. If you are interested in the OKCupid story, Judith also wrote about this in more details, also with my input. https://www.letemps.ch/sciences/2017/04/07/laboratoire-fake-...

hey man, do you guys have a template email I can send so I can get my own data out of Tinder?

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

#110

Post by gknoy »

firloop wrote: post #107
wackro wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number 2 is standard. In my experience It's a form of logging more than a form of data collection.

What's the difference between logging and data collection?

I work on a web application, and would love to have some metrics which I would consider "logging". The distinction I would make is,

- Data collection is about learning things about your users - Logging is about learning what your users were doing when Something Went Wrong.

Obviously, there's a _ton_ of overlap here, in that a lot of (all of?) the info one uses collects for one purpose could be used for the other. As a developer of the UI, however, my main concern is not about learning more about our users (our UX people already do that), but rather about understanding what happened, or which features are actually being used (so that we can know if they are safe to prune).

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