Stop Sharing Tinder Screenshots Online, Monsters!
“There is a privacy problem on the Internet” – this statement is unlikely to shock you. But just because we’ve all lost a lot of what we traditionally consider privacy doesn’t mean we need to resort to bad behavior. Case in point: if you’re sharing screenshots of people’s profiles on dating apps, you need to stop.
I’ve skipped the boatload of dating apps, so I’m certainly not someone who’s too familiar with them. But I know a thing or two about privacy, and the tendency to share profiles on dating apps is the furthest thing from it. Not only is this unfair to users whose Tinder profiles are exposed to the public, it’s not safe.
Dating apps require a lot of personal information
Here’s the thing: when someone creates a dating profile on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, whatever you have, you are expected to share enough personal information to make it easy to get to know other users. This most often includes your name, age, location, school, interests, and of course, your photo.
People include this information with the expectation that it will only be available to other users of the app, especially users within the specified radius. Of course, it could be a lot of people, depending on where you live, but it’s a manageable number of people. These are all users of the same application. You tell all Hinge users in New York that you are 23 and in graduate school, not all Hinge users and certainly not everyone with an internet connection.
However, when you take a screenshot of this information from someone within your range and post it online, the number of people who now have access increases exponentially. Are you moving personal data from a controlled environment around the world , and for what? Internet points? Fleeting glory? Grow.
Poorly moderated forums allow these screenshots to be shared
What really caught my attention was this post on r/tinder. I won’t link to it here because, again, there’s no need to invade anyone’s privacy. However, one Redditor posted a screenshot of a user’s Tinder profile on a subreddit, presumably to poke fun at them. The post received nearly 30,000 upvotes for a total of over 40,000 upvotes and nearly 5,500 comments, many of which toast a Tinder user for choosing a profile.
Of course, this is the Internet, and cruelty is to be expected here. However, the user’s name, age, school, hometown, and photo were shared with the Reddit community of over 5.6 million. Not only that, I’m not even subscribed to r/tinder: I saw it when I was browsing r/popular, so it’s impossible to tell how many non-subscribers also saw or interacted with the post.
I saw one comment thread speak out against the apparent privacy violations going on here, but most users only thought about making fun of a Tinder user’s profile. Who knows how many people turned to Google to learn more about them.
First, Redditor was wrong to post the screenshot, and we should discourage this practice. But it was also wrong for the subreddit to allow it in the first place. R/tinder has a policy against sharing personal information, but it’s vague:
Images containing personal information (phone numbers, addresses, Facebook accounts, unique/easy-to-identify names, or other similar information) will be removed.
Technically, nothing in the screenshot violated this policy. There was a city on the list, but there was no address, and the name was the most common. The policy is restrictive enough to prevent users from sharing screenshots of private messages with information like phone numbers and home addresses, but weak enough to allow sharing things like age and location.
Posting screenshots of a dating app puts people in danger
This loophole is significant. The information in this post is enough to find this user elsewhere on the Internet, potentially finding out exactly where they live. You shouldn’t feel like you’re doxing yourself using dating apps like Tinder as they are designed, but there is a danger in forums like Reddit due to poor moderation.
Of course, you could post less information on your profile, but that defeats the purpose. You want to know a little about the potential matches in these apps before you go to them. It’s good to know if you’re close in age, if you live in the area, or if you have similar interests. To be honest, the whole platform depends on it.
So, if you’re the kind of person who shares Tinder profiles online, please, for the sake of everyone’s privacy, stop . After all, no one wants to date a scumbag.