Yale Privacy Lab Indentifies Trackers on Tinder and OKCupid

Yale Privacy Lab, working in collaboration with non-profit organisation Exodus Privacy, have found a ‘staggering variety’ of trackers in popular apps on Android.

Trackers collect information on consumers, which can then be analysed and used to better target advertising.

Tinder and OKCupid were both found to have over five trackers each, with Tinder being singled out by The Intercept for using third party trackers as well as its own.

Companies are able to purchase information from Tinder that gives them extremely detailed consumer information, which can then be turned into actionable insights or advertisements.

One high-profile case was Gillette partnering with Tinder to investigate how clean-shaven users fare vs bearded users.

Google’s DoubleClick tracker was found in both Tinder and OKCupid, suggesting third party trackers are something which the tech giant does not see as problematic for consumers.

DoubleClick “targets users by location and across devices and channels, segments users based on online behavior, connects to personally identifiable information, and offers data sharing and integration with various advertising systems”, The Intercept reports.

Both Tinder and OKCupid also make use of the Google-owned tracker Crashlytics – a crash reporting app which, though seemingly innocuous, tracks users across different devices.

Braze, used by OKCupid, tracks the location of users as well as helping advertisers to target them more accurately.

Read more here.