When people sign up for a dating site like Tinder, they don’t expect their profiles and personal information to be searchable — especially by a scorned lover, or worse. But that’s what popular apps like Cheaterbuster or CheatEye seem to be doing under the guise of being able to “catch cheaters.”
Last week, 404 Media published a report about apps that apparently use facial recognition technology to trace dating profiles of private citizens as evidence that these partners are unfaithful. Many of these services charge a one-time fee to locate a Tinder profile with just a name or a photo of the person’s face. (Some searches can run you $18 a transaction.) 404 Media tested their technology by running searches with consenting subjects and accurately located their dating profiles.
Without any context about why someone’s Tinder profile may exist, these transactions lack nuance and normalize a dangerous practice, as almost every data and privacy scholar we spoke to warned against using them — some even making the case for them to be banned.
“The most insidious aspect is how these tools make peer-to-peer surveillance seem normal and acceptable,” says cyber and privacy expert Heather Kuhn, an adjunct professor of the College of Law at Georgia State University who’s also a senior privacy counsel at a software company. “Marketing them through viral TikTok videos trivializes the act of biometric surveillance and conditions people to accept it as a solution to relationship problems.”
When Tinder users upload their images and all their identifying info — like where they live, went to school, even the last live location they opened the app — they’re not agreeing for it to be used in any other context outside of Tinder.
“They are agreeing to the platform’s terms, not consenting to have their data scraped, indexed in a third-party database, and made searchable via their biometric data,” says Kuhn.
Mark Weinstein, a tech advisor who’s written several books advocating for safer practices online, says these third-party apps are “frankly chilling.”
“What’s marketed as ‘cheater busting’ is really just vigilante surveillance,” Weinstein tells The Verge. And while apps like Cheaterbuster most likely do use facial recognition tools to locate dating profiles, they can also use a litany of public data to cross-reference names, age, and locations “to build shadow databases of dating profiles that Tinder never meant to be public,” Weinstein explains. “It’s mass data mining, connecting the dots on people without their consent.”
Some experts are shocked that Tinder hasn’t sought retribution against them yet. “It seems like it violates the app’s terms of service, so from that perspective, should it exist?” poses Marshini Chetty, a University of Chicago professor who teaches courses on usable privacy and security. “You’re doing something the company is not condoning — I guess I’m wondering why it hasn’t been shut down.”
Tinder did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Apps like Cheaterbuster and CheatEye also have not responded to requests for comment.
... continue reading