Kind: captions
Language: en
your dating app probably knows you way
better than you think dating apps
collect tons of information about you
and it's not all in service of finding
you the perfect match when you sign up
for a dating app you might volunteer
basic
information but some of these apps
collect more information than you may
realize like where you live work or your
race religion and political views
especially if you're sharing your
location which can be helpful for
finding matches in your area but also
opens the door for these apps to gather
information about the places you live
work or visit regularly for instance if
a bunch of people who have um
minoritized gender identity or sexual
orientations keep showing up in a
particular location and looking for
matches it starts to look like a sort of
queer area so it starts to make these
sort of inferences based on what other
users who share some common information
what about them it's showing up in this
place some dating apps can track where
you travel online even after you leave
the app and if you link your dating
account to your social media accounts
these apps may be able to access all
kinds of personal information they use
all this data to make predictions about
who and what you might like so this is a
complicated space for me where I'm like
well is it really that bad that someone
has my data but again here the issue is
not just the data that I've shared but
data that you can find about me because
of the data I've shared and that you can
infer about me the apps have the ability
to collect all this information when you
agree to the terms of service but why
are these apps collecting all of this
data and what are they doing with it the
primary reason is to make money let's be
honest so many dating apps have a sort
of freemium model where to use it
initially is free but to get better
matches they sell users features and
they collect additional information to
inform those features a second way that
the apps can make money off of this
information is by selling it to
advertisers who can in turn create more
targeted ads but for anyone concerned
about privacy there are steps you can
take to reduce your risks first check
what kinds of permissions you've granted
for the app to access your location
contacts photos or other social media
accounts another thing you can do um is
to provide the minimal amount of
information the mobile dating apps have
really long sets of questions that you
can answer to try to make your match
more specific it's not clear that a more
specific match is actually more likely
to be what you're looking for so maybe
give it as little information as you can
and cast a broader net finally if you
are going to stop using your account it
is important to delete your information
and not just deactivate your account
that way your data isn't stored but it
really does just come down to what
you're comfortable with what your
personal values are and how much of your
data you're willing to share
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