If you are not paying for the product, you are the product! Unfortunately, this is the sad truth. A study conducted by the Norwegian Consumer Council found that popular dating apps such as Tinder, OkCupid, and Grindr shared detailed user data with third parties to use for advertising purposes.
Some of this data was incredibly personal, including “location, age, gender, as well as, in some cases, sexual orientation, drug use, and religious and political views,” as reported by welivesecurity. In the case of the popular dating app Tinder, it gave away its users locations with an accuracy of around a hundred feet — approximately the distance between bases on a regulation baseball diamond.
In an investigation for The Guardian, Judith Duportail emailed Tinder to request her data collected from the app so that she could know what they knew about her. She received a whopping 800 pages of information about her, including when and where her conversations with her matches occurred, her preferred age range in dating, and even her education.
All that information is mostly shared with third-party advertisers. Privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye explained that the third-party advertisers could use this data for purposes other than merely improving your dating profile, including “what job offers you have access to on LinkedIn, how much you will pay for insuring your car, which ad you will see in the tube and if you can subscribe to a loan.”
And it goes further than that: This information is also ripe for the picking when it comes to hackers. In 2020, Tinder suffered a massive data breach as the result of a coordinated cybercrime forum. These hackers specifically targeted female users of the app, posting their photos online and opening the door for abusive use of these photos. That’s terrifying.
Thankfully, there is a way better option if you want to find love without scattering your personal information across the internet.
Strike is a revolutionary new technology that connects people while maintaining data privacy. Privacy is a core value of Strike, and we have eliminated server usage for matching purposes. Instead of uploading your information on servers, Strike uses a wearable hardware called Scout to compare and connect match criteria. This patent pending technology works as a barrier and connects only to its paired smartphone and to other Scout devices for matching purposes. Your information remains in your hands. If ever lost or stolen, the encrypted information on your Scout cannot be accessed or read by a third party.
This way, your personal information or location are never shared with other users or third-party advertisers!
Strike follows the recommendations published by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to keep your personal dating life private. The only information collected is what is necessary for billing and/or optional additional services e.g. background or identity checks.
Connect with people wherever you go – knowing that your Scout protects your data and privacy. Learn more on www.strike-lifestyle.com
Happy Matching!