Episode Details

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

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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 sh