Judith Duportail got privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye and human rights lawyer Ravi Naik to help her force Tinder to turn over 800 pages of records the company had saved during the four years she’d used the app, and discovered that the company was indefinitely retaining “information such as my Facebook “likes”, my photos from Instagram (even after I deleted the associated account), my education, the age-rank of men I was interested in, how many times I connected, when and where every online conversation with every single one of my matches happened.”
“You are lured into giving away all this information,” says Luke Stark, a digital technology sociologist at Dartmouth University. “Apps such as Tinder are taking advantage of a simple emotional phenomenon; we can’t feel data. This is why seeing everything printed strikes you. We are physical creatures. We need materiality.”Reading through the 1,700 Tinder messages I’ve sent since 2013, I took a trip into my hopes, fears, sexual preferences and deepest secrets. Tinder knows me so well. It knows the real, inglorious version of me who copy-pasted the same joke to match 567, 568, and 569; who exchanged compulsively with 16 different people simultaneously one New Year’s Day, and then ghosted 16 of them.
I asked Tinder for my data. It sent me 800 pages of my deepest, darkest secrets
[Judith Duportail/The Guardian]