Privacy

Life’s short, have an affair. But for the love of two-timing tricksters everywhere, don’t do it on Ashley Madison.

Following the catastrophic hack that hit the company in 2015, the dating site for extramarital action is in hot water again - this time for exposing a large portion of its cheating clientele’s private photos.

A team of security researchers has revealed that “poor technical and logical implementations” has left many images from Ashley Madison users vulnerable to exposure online. Due to these flaws, they wrote in a report, approximately 64% of the site’s private (and often explicit) pictures are accessible.

It’s Saturday night. The stomach butterflies are building as you prepare to meet your latest Tinder date. You’re both Seinfeld fans who love animals and sweating it out in grueling CrossFit classes. And you’ve always had a secret thing for redheads. You have a good feeling about this one. But do you really know them?

Online dating fraud victim numbers have hit a record high. Scammers and catfishers develop increasingly clever cons, swindling lovesick singles out of money and property, and in some cases committing violent crimes. Even avowed advocates for digital dating have to admit the system has serious flaws.

Recent months have seen several companies in the industry take matters into their own hands. OkCupid introduced a member pledge in attempt to curb the unsolicited sending of explicit images. Bumble joined forces with the Anti-Defamation League to announce a zero-tolerance policy against misogynist, abusive, and inappropriate behavior. Tinder launched the ‘Menprovement Initiative’ to raise the bar for male behavior on the app.

Online dating algorithms have gotten a lot of attention (and criticism) because they’re the basis of how matchmaking works. Many dating apps are secretive about their matching process, but traditionally, algorithms match people on the basis of profile information, questionnaires, and user preferences.

But according to a recent article by Gizmodo, online dating companies can collect more information about their customers through analyzing user behavior, which includes what users do on social media as well as on the dating app. Companies are now starting to use this behavioral data for matchmaking purposes rather than relying on profiles and user preferences.

eHarmony, Match and OkCupid are known for their long surveys and profile questions, which they maintain helps them more accurately assess potential matches. But dating apps like Tinder, Bumble and LoveFlutter prefer mining users’ social media streams, bypassing questions and looking to online behavior.

Online dating has always held some risk, and in recent years, the challenge of protecting consumers from trolls and unwanted messages has increased. Many dating apps like Tinder are finding themselves at risk to hackers who are creating fake accounts and hacking other users - this in addition to increasing problems with lewd messages. A new dating app called Hily aims to change that trend.

Many dating apps are trying to put more safety measures in place to verify their users. According to an article in TechCrunch, cyber security researchers found that hackers could create a Chrome plugin so that a Tinder user could find the locations of Facebook friends who were also on Tinder (even though they didn’t disclose this information on their social media feeds), a scary thought for online daters who are trying to keep their personal information private.

The lack of security has been especially difficult for young women who use dating apps. More and more are reporting getting trolled or harassed by other users on online dating sites, or sent unwanted messages and photos. This is one of the reasons female-friendly apps like Bumble have become so popular – women have more control of their experience on the app. But verifying profiles has remained a challenge, as hackers have found ways around protections.

A woman from Canberra, Australia has been suspended by dating app Tinder for asking too many matches whether or not they registered to vote, so they could receive a ballot to vote on marriage equality.

She originally started asking friends and followers to register to vote over social media, and after many of them did, she took to Tinder to try and engage more people.

According to website Junkee, the woman, known as “Lizzy” reported that a lot of men thanked her for the reminder and were glad she reached out to them to advocate for a worthy cause. One man even shared her message along with the link to the voter registration site to all of his matches.

Online dating skeptics have plenty of reasons for opting out of modern singles’ favorite way to date, but here’s one they probably hadn’t thought of yet: personal photos being stolen for use in AI experiments.

A user of Kaggle, a platform for machine learning and data science competitions which was recently acquired by Google, exploited Tinder’s API to scrape 40,000 profile photos from Bay Area users of the dating app. He used them to train artificial intelligence, and also organized the images into a downloadable facial data set called People of Tinder.

Stuart Colianni, the creator of the data set, described it as a “simple script to scrape Tinder profile photos for the purpose of creating a facial dataset.” He also described Tinder as offering “near unlimited access to create a facial data set” and said his scraping the app offers “an extremely efficient way to collect such data.”