New Website Lets Anyone Spy on Tinder Users (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader cites an article on The Guardian: Tinder isn't as private as many of its users think, and a new website which aims to exploit that is causing concern among users of the dating app Swipebuster promises to let Tinder users find out whether people they know have an account on the dating app, and even stalk them down to their last known location. The website charges $4.99 to let someone see whether the target is using Tinder, and can narrow down results by first name, age, gender and location. But it doesn't do so by hacking into Tinder, or even by "scraping" the app manually. Instead, it searches the database using Tinder's official API, which is intended for use by third-party developers who want to write software that plugs in with the site. All the information that it can reveal is considered public by the company, and revealed through the API with few safeguards.

Comments

Tinder is not a dating app.

[dc29A]

Tinder is not a dating app, it's a fuck finder app.

Re:Tinder is not a dating app.

[a4r6]

a lot of people say that, but then if you look at tinder, a great deal of the profiles say not into hookups, looking for dates.

in reality there are probably a huge number of men looking for random sex, and very few women, with very few actual 1st encounter hookups.
much like what ashleymadison turned out to be...

Re:Tinder is not a dating app.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you used tinder? your "in reality" is not the reality. yes some profiles say not looking to hookup, but they are just playing hard to get.

Ok cupid is more for dating, Tinder is for hookups and Plenty of fish seems to be the middle ground. I speak from experience, its pretty easy to see from how the user interface is designed.

Re:Tinder is not a dating app.

[rmdingler]

FD: I have never used Tinder, outside of a Bear Grylls situation.

My 20ish son has used it to entice girls to his apt for some Netflix and chill multiple times with crafty lines like, "Do you like what you see?"

I swear it used to be more difficult than that.

Tinder?

[sims 2]

Is that a new amazon app for their line of fire products?

Re:Anybody who uses a Facebook product is an idiot

[im_thatoneguy]

Do you mean every app on the internet is a "facebook app" even if it's not owned by Facebook? Are you using "Facebook" like "Kleenex"?

New employee tracker

[Billly Gates]

I can see this being used by bosses and HR to see if someone is really sick or not

Just a word of warning guys:

[Narcocide]

I've looked into lots of these APIs myself, as well as their license agreements for the developer accounts required to use them. Twitter and Facebook's aren't any more capable of protecting user data from being harvested by app creators. The privacy of your friend's list and its spidery web of interconnects to other site users is protected by the honor system only.

But...

[Greyfox]

But Grindr is still OK, right?