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70,000 Tinder Photos Leaked to Cyber-Crime Forum

More than 70,000 Tinder photos have been leaked to a cyber-crime forum. A New York-based taskforce on cyber sexual assault found that the vast number of photos were scraped onto a website known for trading malicious software.

The leak is also accompanied by 16,000 unique Tinder ID’s, which could be an indicator as to how many profiles have been breached. 

Concerns have been raised after the photos were leaked, all of which were take from profiles belonging to women, regarding the potential use for these photos, including identity theft, facial recognition, and or to target and harass the individual user.

A Tinder official told Gizmodo, that use of any photos or information outside the confines of the app is strictly prohibited. The company would take whatever steps it could, they said, to have the data removed.

The taskforce was doubtful the files would be easy to take down, but has offered to provide Tinder with the archive’s location.

This breach follows an incident in 2017, where a researcher at Kaggle used 40,000 Tinder profile images to inform a machine learning model. At the time Tinder labelled the act a “violation”, and said it would take “the appropriate action”.

“We work hard to keep our members and their information safe,” a spokesperson said. “We know that this work is ever-evolving for the industry as a whole, and we are constantly identifying and implementing new best practices and measures to make it more difficult for anyone to commit a violation like this.”

Tinder also noted that all of the photos are public and can be viewed by others through regular use of the app; although, obviously, the app is not designed to help a single person amass such a massive quantity of images.

Read more here.

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