Dating App Privacy
Listen now
Description
Finding your soul mate or even just a one-night stand can all be done digitally now - there's an app for that. Several, in fact. But in order to find the best match, you need to turn over a lot of extremely personal information. You probably also need to let the app track your location, so you're only matching people within some acceptable distance. You would hope that dating apps would be better than other apps at securing your private data... but are they? And are these services selling my data to advertisers? Today I answer these questions and many more with Zoë MacDonald from Mozilla's Privacy Not Included team who recently published a full report on this topic. Interview Notes Privacy Not Included report on dating apps: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/data-hungry-dating-apps-are-worse-than-ever-for-your-privacy/  Mozilla Foundation: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/?form=donate-header  Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/  Falling out of love with dating apps: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/28/its-quite-soul-destroying-how-we-fell-out-of-love-with-dating-apps  Using dating apps to locate someone: https://www.techradar.com/pro/privacy-flaw-in-top-dating-apps-could-have-revealed-user-location-down-to-2-metres  How to freeze your credit: https://firewallsdontstopdragons.com/credit-freeze-now-is-the-time/  Further Info Send me your questions! https://fdsd.me/qna  Check out my book, Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons: https://fdsd.me/book  Subscribe to the newsletter: https://fdsd.me/newsletter  Become a patron! https://www.patreon.com/FirewallsDontStopDragons  Get your Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons Merch! https://fdsd.me/merch  Give the gift of privacy and security: https://fdsd.me/coupons  Support our mission! https://fdsd.me/support  Generate secure passphrases! https://d20key.com/#/  Table of Contents Use these timestamps to jump to a particular section of the show. 0:57:02: Wrap-up and looking ahead 0:02:06: Freeze your credit! 0:04:19: How do modern dating apps work, exactly? 0:08:19: How do they find compatible matches? 0:10:34: Do these apps require constant access to your current location? 0:14:50: How much information used by these apps is inferred vs explicitly requested? 0:17:59: Do these apps use inferred data to weed out bad actors? 0:20:36: How did you decide which apps to evaluate? 0:23:54: What were your key takeaways and most alarming findings? 0:25:57: Do apps owned by the same parent company have similar privacy policies? 0:27:28: How transparent are these apps about sharing your data? 0:29:08: Was there any correlation between app cost and monetizing your data? 0:31:20: Are dating apps better about securing your personal data? 0:33:53: Do any of the dating apps offer end-to-end encryption of DMs? 0:35:40: Do these services try to keep you from leaving the app? 0:39:03: Once you find a match, can you get a refund for unused subscription time?
More Episodes
Holiday shopping season is here! And today I'll give you the highlights of my annual Best & Worst Gift Guide for 2024, with regard to privacy and security. The worst offenders may not surprise you, though some have actually gotten worse since just last year. And I have a few new suggestions...
Published 11/18/24
Device manufacturers are breathing new life into old mundane products by connecting them to the internet, giving us the ability to monitor and control them from anywhere. However, this connection to the cloud works both ways. Not only do device makers now have unprecedented access to our usage...
Published 11/11/24