Brokers are selling Tinder, OkCupid data; details like sexual-orientation available
Millions of dating profiles from sites like Tinder and OkCupid are being auctioned by shady data brokers. The profiles carry information ranging from contact numbers and emails to personal data like age, photos, appearance, and sexual orientation, Motherboard reported. The data is being offered in batches classified by nationality and sex and is claimed to be '100% legal'. Here is how it's being sold.
Profiles up for public sale on US-based marketplace
Personal information often tends to appear on darkweb marketplaces, but in this case, seemingly legit online dating profiles were found in the open. Essentially, a site named 'USDate' was found to be offering millions of profiles for a few hundred dollars for every batch. The selling practice was revealed by a Berlin-based NGO named Tactical Tech and researcher Joana Moll.
Profiles from sites like Tinder, OkCupid
As part of a project titled "The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love," Moll purchased one million profiles from USDate - for just $153. With this, she got access to every piece of information those profiles had, including age, sex, physical traits, and some 5 million photos. The profiles, as Motherboard said, came from multiple sites, including Tinder, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish.
Are all these profiles real?
USDate, on its part, claims that the profiles are genuine and "belong to real people actively dating today and looking for partners." Meanwhile, Moll says the batches likely contain a mix of real and spoofed profiles. In the purchased batch, they were able to match some profiles with the ones active on Plenty of Fish - owned by Match group.
But, how these brokers get access to these profiles?
When we access dating sites, we accept their terms, which seemingly provides an escape window to these companies for exchanging and trading profiles. "Established dating sites are also continuously trading in profiles - in order to get new faces into their services and thus increase the matchmaking probabilities among their users (and get new paying subscribers)", said Tactical Tech's project report.
No comment from dating sites, yet
As of now, the dating platforms whose profiles were found on USDate have not commented on the report. However, the broker claims that the practice is absolutely legal. The FAQ section of its website reads they sell "100% legal dating profiles as we have permission from the owners. Selling fake profiles is illegal because generated fake profiles use real people's photos without their permission."
