Stop sharing Tinder screenshots online

Dating apps are very interesting and useful tools. On the other hand, sharing profiles online can be very dangerous.

“There is a privacy problem on the Internet” is a statement that is not shocking today. But just because we all lost on that score doesn’t mean we should be bad. For example, if you have a habit of sharing screenshots of your dating profiles, then you should stop.

I don’t use dating apps personally, but I know a lot about online privacy and privacy, and this tendency for people to share other people’s profiles is far from it. This is not only unfair to users whose Tinder profiles are available to millions of Internet users.

Dating apps ask for a lot of personal information

When someone creates a dating profile on Tinder, Hinge, Humble or elsewhere, a lot of personal information needs to be shared to make it easier to connect. Most often, this includes entering a name, age, location, school, interests, and of course, a photo.

People provide this information with the expectation that it will only be available to other app users, especially those in the same area. Of course, this can be a lot of people, depending on where you live, but the number is still limited. For example, you tell all Tinder users who live in Paris that you are 23 years old and going to university, not all Tinder users and not least all Internet users around the world.

However, when you share a screenshot of a profile online, the number of people who have access to that information skyrockets. Are you sharing personal data with the world in a controlled environment, and for what? Never!

Poorly moderated forums allow these screenshots to be shared

It was the post on r/tinder that caught my attention. I won’t share it here, but Redditor posted a screenshot of a Tinder profile on a subreddit, most likely to poke fun at him. The post garnered nearly 30,000 upvotes, over 40,000 upvotes, and nearly 5,500 comments, most of which were not entirely constructive.

Obviously, this is the Internet, such cruelty is to be expected. However, the user’s name, age, school, city of residence, and photo were submitted to the Reddit community, which has over 5.6 million users. And again, I’m not following r/tinder, I saw the post while browsing r/popular, so it’s impossible to know how many non-subscribers might have seen or been interested in this post..

I’ve seen discussion in the comments about the privacy violations caused by this practice, but most users only saw the funny side of it. Who knows how many people have searched Google to find out more.

This Redditor was not supposed to post the screenshot and we can only advise against this practice. But the subreddit shouldn’t have allowed it to be posted either. r/tinder has a policy regarding the sharing of personal information, but it remains vague:

Images that contain personal information (phone number, address, Facebook account, unique or easily identifiable names, or other similar information) will be removed.

Technically, nothing in this screenshot violates these rules. There was a city, but there was no address, and the name was very common. This rule is restrictive enough to prevent users from sharing screenshots of private messages with information like phone numbers or home addresses, but loose enough to share things like age and location.

Dating app takeover puts people at risk

This shortcoming is very important. There is more than enough information in this post for an attacker to be able to find this user on the Internet and possibly find where they live. You don’t actually use dating apps like Tinder the way they were thought of and designed, but due to poorly moderated platforms like Reddit, this can be a real danger.

Obviously, you could share less information on your profile, but you would lose all interest in the app. You want to know a little about the potential match of these apps before taking any further action. It’s good to know that you’re the same age, don’t live too far apart, or have common interests. The whole platform depends on it.

So, if you are one of those sharing Tinder profiles online, please, for the sake of everyone, stop.