Whilst dating apps have revolutionised modern day dating, they also pose privacy risks which are often overlooked by users.
Unlike a lot of other apps, dating apps request a lot of sensitive information in order to build a user’s profile. This includes: name, age, gender, date of birth, religion, sexual orientation, drugs and alcohol use, whether you have/want kids, height and weight.
If this information was to get leaked it could expose users to hackers and scammers who use people’s sensitive information in order to trick them into sending money over to them.
MoneyTransfers.com have analysed 15 different dating apps to see which of those share the most of the sensitive information with third parties.
The research concluded that 67% of dating apps collect personal information in order to share it with third parties. Badoo and HER were shown to share the most data with third parties (35%), including location, contact information, identifiers and usage data.
eHarmony and Grindr share 21% of data with third parties and Tinder and Plenty of Fish collect and share 14% of users personal data with third parties.
Out of these 15 apps, only 5 did not share personal data. These were: Hinge, Thursday, Flava, Once, and Raya.
In order to show nearby matches, the majority of the 15 apps use GPS and Wifi to track user location.
From the results, Badoo and HER were the worst for using personal data in order to track users.
eHarmony and Bumble collect 29% of users’ data for tracking purposes. In third was OKCupid which used 21% of users’ data to track them.
When it came to using data for their own marketing purposes, OKCupid collected the most personal data for their own benefits with 42% of users’ personal data in order to serve relevant ads on behalf of others.
Overall, based on how much data the apps collected in total, for selling on, keeping for their own benefit and for tracking you, the least private dating apps included Badoo and HER in joint first followed by OKCupid and eharmony in second and third.
Thursday was shown to be the safest dating app to use when it came to the safety and privacy of personal data.