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Massive Tinder Photo Scrape Has Users Upset (techcrunch.com)
Images of Tinder users "were swept up in a massive grab of some 40,000 photos from the dating app by a dataset collector who plans to use the selfies in artificial intelligence training," writes Slashdot reader Frosty Piss, sharing this summary of a report in TechCrunch.
Tinder said in a statement that the photo sweeper "violated the terms of our service" and "we are taking appropriate action and investigating further." The creator of the data set, Stuart Colianni, has released it under a CC0: Public Domain License and also uploaded his scraper script to GitHub.
He describes it as a "simple script to scrape Tinder profile photos for the purpose of creating a facial dataset," saying his inspiration for creating the scraper was disappointment working with other facial data sets. He also describes Tinder as offering "near unlimited access to create a facial data set," and says scraping the app offers "an extremely efficient way to collect such data."
The article notes that Tinder's API has already been used for other "weird, wacky, and creepy" projects, including "hacking it to automatically like every potential date to save on thumb-swipes; offering a paid look-up service for people to check up on whether a person they know is using Tinder; and even building a catfishing system to snare horny bros and make them unwittingly flirt with each other.
"So you could argue that anyone creating a profile on Tinder should be prepared for their data to leech outside the community's porous walls in various different ways -- be it as a single screenshot, or via one of the aforementioned API hacks. But the mass harvesting of thousands of Tinder profile photos to act as fodder for feeding AI models does feel like another line is being crossed."
He describes it as a "simple script to scrape Tinder profile photos for the purpose of creating a facial dataset," saying his inspiration for creating the scraper was disappointment working with other facial data sets. He also describes Tinder as offering "near unlimited access to create a facial data set," and says scraping the app offers "an extremely efficient way to collect such data."
The article notes that Tinder's API has already been used for other "weird, wacky, and creepy" projects, including "hacking it to automatically like every potential date to save on thumb-swipes; offering a paid look-up service for people to check up on whether a person they know is using Tinder; and even building a catfishing system to snare horny bros and make them unwittingly flirt with each other.
"So you could argue that anyone creating a profile on Tinder should be prepared for their data to leech outside the community's porous walls in various different ways -- be it as a single screenshot, or via one of the aforementioned API hacks. But the mass harvesting of thousands of Tinder profile photos to act as fodder for feeding AI models does feel like another line is being crossed."
Tinder said in a statement that the photo sweeper "violated the terms of our service" and "we are taking appropriate action and investigating further."
TOS is meaningless in cases like this. TOS are meaningless anyway, except as, perhaps, a means to ban users. And that's pretty pointless as well.
But really, what do people that put their photographs out on the Intertubes like this expect? Privacy? Really?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Putting aside all the victim blaming for a second...
This is meant to be a private (closed-source) application, with a private API interacting to the private server.
Why the hell can anyone (read: unauthenticated users) access private data via a public and unrestricted URL? I've read articles reverse engineering their API. It's terrible! This is another company who did not put enough time and effort into securing the application and API, and now users (read: non-technical, real people, some of which paid money, all of which trusted the company) are left exposed.
I really wish there was a way to force companies (ie: legislate) to place far higher importance on this. I've also been in situations where, as a developer, I've had managers scuttle or ignore requests to lock things down, in the interests of deadlines or cost or worse yet, "we'll fix it once it's up and running."
But uploading the photos taken somewhere else for public consumption is just wrong.
Tell that to all the people who upload material illegally and the millions who download them illegally.
Society has spoken and said copyright law is irrelevant. These are the consequences. Suck it up.