Safety

The hacking of large company databases for personal and compromising information is on the rise. First it was giant retailer Target, then entertainment studio Sony, followed by a few of the major insurance companies - and it has been reported that as many as 200 companies have been hacked in the last few years, its victims their own customers and employees.

But this week, in perhaps the most personal of the recent data hacks, dating website Adult Friend Finder (a service for those looking for casual friendships and sexual hook-ups), has announced that its customer data has also been breached.

Channel 4 News in the UK has reported that the personal information of 3.9 million of AdultFriendFinder.com’s members was discovered in an online forum for hackers, including users’ sexual preferences, e-mail addresses, dates of birth and, in some cases, whether they were looking to cheat on their spouses. The company has notified law enforcement agencies, but said that no financial or password information seems to have been stolen.

AdultFriendFinder is different from traditional dating sites in that the information people provide is much more personal. When a user signs up, the services asks him/ her to detail his interests and, based on those criteria, matches people for sexual encounters. The site, which boasts 64 million members, claims to have "helped millions of people find traditional partners, swinger groups, threesomes, and a variety of other alternative partners."

So customers who joined the website to anonymously post their sexual preferences for hook-ups might now face being exposed to family members, co-workers, bosses, and even spouses or partners, compromising their personal lives.

One controversial hacker took advantage of the now-exposed data to identify over Twitter and personally name four different men who were using the dating site – including one who was married. Because the data is now accessible to anyone, many more people could be publicly shamed as a result.

According to CNN Money: “The breach was carried out by a hacker who goes by the moniker ROR[RG]. In an online hacker forum, he said he blackmailed Adult FriendFinder, telling the site he would expose the data online unless the company paid him $100,000.”

"Until the investigation is completed, it will be difficult to determine with certainty the full scope of the incident, but we will continue to work vigilantly to address this potential issue and will provide updates as we learn more from our investigation," FriendFinder's statement said.

According to The Wall Street Journal, researchers noted that as awareness of the breach spread on Friday May 22nd, more copies of the files were appearing online, meaning more people potentially had access to the data.

Tired of meeting flaky people over dating apps like Tinder? Turns out, there’s a reason for all the disappearing acts: a recent study by GlobalWebIndex reported that up to 42% of the population on Tinder are already in relationships. And incredibly, 3 in 10 users are married. Before you start bashing men, the report also broke down information by gender, and it turns out that married and taken women on Tinder outnumber the men on the app who are already in relationships.

In response to this, and perhaps to further differentiate themselves from the popular dating app, Hinge has announced that in the latest release of its dating app, it will publish whether or not you’re in a relationship, engaged or married.

Hinge did its own study among its users, and found that 1.6 percent of them were either married or engaged, while an additional two percent were already in relationships. While Hinge wins hands-down over the high percentage of cheaters on Tinder, it still wants to do better. So in Hinge version 3.5, users who reveal they are “married,” “engaged” or “in a relationship” on Facebook will have that information pulled and shared on their Hinge profile, in an effort to shame cheaters everywhere. And if you remove your relationship status from Facebook to avoid this problem? Then you may have to explain it to your spouse or partner.

Hinge utilizes Facebook to match people who are in the same circles – Facebook friends of friends who are also using the service – so you’ve never really meeting a total stranger. At least, you will have a Facebook friend in common, which helps daters reduce the anxiety about online dating.

The new version adds another great benefit, which is more transparency in dating. Instead of finding yourself devastated to find out several dates later that your match is otherwise involved, it’s out in the open.

This might be a problem for female daters, according to the GlobalWebIndex study, since the majority of cheaters on Tinder happen to be women – the target market and primary user base for Hinge. Hinge appeals to women because of safety issues, especially those who are nervous to try a dating app, because users are matched within their own social networking circles. But if married women take to the app (and perhaps they won’t – and don’t – because they would be called out by their mutual Facebook friends), they have to go to greater lengths to hide their movements.

Regardless, it is a positive step for online dating in general to create more transparency for those who are truly looking to date other single people.

The great thing about online dating (well, one of many) is that it can connect people from almost anywhere in the world. The not-so-great thing is that, eventually, one of those people is bound to be someone you wish it wasn't.

A big city seems surprisingly small when swiping leads you to an ex, or a co-worker, or – squick – a sibling. As soon as that familiar face pops up on your screen, the buffer of anonymity you thought you had shrivels up and expires.

Once upon a time, part of the appeal of online dating was the privacy factor. It felt safe. Looking at photos and a profile kept you one step removed from the real human on the other side, making vulnerability easier and rejection less painful.

Now, with more and more people turning to dating sites and apps, you're increasingly likely to run into someone you recognize. Or worse, someone who recognizes you. Kiss that safety net goodbye.

Some dating services are taking steps to ease the awkwardness. Grindr allows users to set geographical constraints and block other users. On JSwipe, users can turn off the ability to be seen by or match with Facebook friends. On Tinder, a simple swipe left means that person will never appear on your feed again.

OkCupid has plans to take things a step further, with new features set to roll out in the upcoming months. One will allow a user to hide their profile from all users by default. It will only be seen by people they actively “Like” or send a message to. The other feature adds the option of connecting a Facebook account, so all Facebook friends are immediately blocked on OkCupid.

While some are fiercely protective of their privacy, others are taking the opposite stance. A handful of Tinder users told The Daily Beast they swipe right on familiar faces as a friendly hello or a way to reconnect platonically with old acquaintances. Some even admitted to using dating apps and sites to keep tabs on exes. Just imagine the trouble location-based apps could get you into under those circumstances.

If the question is “Is online dating – and social media in general – bringing an end to anonymity?” the answer has to be yes. But if the question is “Does it matter?” the answer becomes more complex.

There's no doubt safety is important. Certain info doesn't belong online because it puts you at risk. But beyond that, what's the issue? Insecurity? Vulnerability?

The world will be a better place when we don't feel insecure or ashamed about wanting a relationship, and seeing as vulnerability is key to any strong romantic foundation, perhaps it isn't something to be feared after all.

Female Tinder users have dealt with a lot of inappropriate messages from men when dating through the app – it’s one of the issues challenging dating apps today. Men are particularly aggressive in their flirting, crossing boundaries with their sexual suggestions and then wondering why they don’t hear back.

A California-based computer engineer, who incidentally met his girlfriend on Tinder, had heard a lot of his female friends complaining about the guys messaging them over the dating app. In an interview with website The Verge, he disclosed that he had been able to hack Tinder, matching straight guys with other straight guys to see how their typically aggressive flirting progresses.

"The original idea was to throw that back into the face of the people doing it to see how they would react," the hacker said.

His program identifies two men who swipe right on one of his bait profiles (one using a prominent vlogger’s image, the second one of a friend who had let him use her photos). Then they are matched to each other (since they already have the woman they were originally attracted to in common). The suitors’ messages, according to The Verge, were all “unabashedly flirtatious” and relayed back and forth to each other through the dummy profile. Sometimes, it took several messages before the duped men started to figure out something was off.

The creator of the hack apparently stepped in before things got to heated and the matches decided to meet in person. Most of them seemed very confused after exchanging a few flirtatious emails, only to discover later that they weren’t flirting with women, but other men. The hacker witnessed about 40 conversations in the first twelve hours.

It has been reported that Tinder is vulnerable to hacks. There have been a few instances of people tweaking the app to “mass-like” several women at the same time, improving their odds of getting a match exponentially.

The Tinder hacker looked into Tinder’s API and discovered it had few safeguards. “Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system,” he said. “As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person.”  

When asked how he feels about hacking into Tinder’s system, he has mixed feelings. "They ignore all the signs, they ignore all the weird things," he says of the users. "When someone is so quick to meet up without any detail or know anything about the person at all — maybe it’s deserved."

Before flirting with someone you just met over Tinder, you might want to ask a few basic questions first.

Have you ever swiped right on a Tinder match only to discover her profile isn’t real? Since the famous dating app partnered with mobile identity company TeleSign, it claims spam is down as much as 90%.

Spam has been a growing problem for Tinder– prostitutes masquerading as potential love matches eager to sell their services, hackers using the dating app to obtain valuable user information, and even companies like The Gap aiming to capitalize on the 18-25 market with clever marketing campaigns. (Last month they set up their campaign ads as Tinder user profiles without explicit permission from the company – and were asked to take them down.) Also, there was the incident of a hacker tinkering with their API to match straight men with other straight men, which ended up confusing and embarrassing a lot of users.

Even though Tinder verifies people through their Facebook accounts, many people have become adept at creating fake social media accounts, too. So Tinder’s new deal with Telesign seems to be alleviating the problem.

Telesign works by analyzing massive amounts of real-time and historical data on phone numbers, including associated contact information, phone types, geographies, and carriers. Their technology uses PhoneID verification to determine how potentially risky a phone number is, and whether the number really belongs to the person creating the account. If the score is high (meaning high risk), the user is blocked. Telesign also recommended that Tinder implement rate limits. This means that Tinder can set a limit for the number of accounts created using the same phone number. The companies did not say whether the analyzed information from Tinder users is kept private, or how it could be used by TeleSign or Tinder.

Ryan Ogle, Tinder’s CTO said in a statement: “Once we had TeleSign in place, we were able to block fraudulent accounts in a much more sophisticated way. It’s been 100 percent accurate and we’ve seen about a 90 percent reduction in spam traffic as a result, from day one.”

Tinder has taken other steps to cut back on spammers, including limiting the amount of swipes people can do in a 24-hour period with the free service. If they want to swipe indefinitely (as spam bots often do), they will have to pay for Tinder Plus.

This is another big step for the company, which seems to be making significant changes in recent months. IAC, the parent company of Tinder, has brought in a new CEO, and in March, Tinder rolled out its first paid service, Tinder Plus.

Check out our review of Tinder for more information on this popular dating app.

Call me crazy, but part of me says this is just basic common sense. If a company gives you a device, it's for work. It's not for surfing BuzzFeed, uploading pictures of your cat to Instagram, or looking for Saturday night plans on a dating app.

But let's get real. That's an idealized world we don't live in. If someone gives us a device, we're going to do whatever we want on it (but maybe in Incognito mode). That goes for the listicles, the cat snaps, and the dating apps.

You may think it's no big deal, as long as your boss isn't looking over your shoulder, but a new study by IBM may change your mind. The study found that employees who use dating apps on their company’s smartphone or tablet risk exposing themselves to major security threats. We're talking hacking, spying, data theft – all kinds of big scary things you don't want to have to explain to your supervisor.

Researchers analyzed 41 dating applications and found that 60% were potentially vulnerable to cyberattacks that put personal or corporate data at risk. Many apps have access to additional features on mobile devices, such as the camera, microphone, storage, GPS location and mobile wallet billing information. IBM also found that nearly 50% of the organizations they reviewed had at least one popular dating app installed on mobile devices used to access business information.

Hello, hacker jackpot.

The potential vulnerabilities include:

• Downloading malware onto your device through your dating app
• GPS location information being used to track your movements
• Your credit card numbers being stolen through the app
• Remote control of your phone's camera or microphone
• Hijacking the content or images of your dating profile

Using your personal phone for work purposes (known as “bring your own device” or BYOD) can also pose a problem. “The trouble with BYOD is that, if not managed properly, the organizations might be leaking sensitive corporate data via employee-owned devices,” the report said.

To protect yourself against dating app hacks, avoid divulging too much info in public on your profile. Be sure to check an app's permissions before you download it, so you know what it has access to. Use unique passwords for every account you have, and only connect trusted Wi-Fi networks.

Finally, always apply the latest updates to your apps and device when they become available. This will fix any bugs that have been identified in your device and applications, resulting in a more secure experience.