Tinder wants to scan your camera roll: this is why you should opt out

If dating apps aren’t scary enough, Tinder is testing out a new feature that will scan your device’s photo gallery to check for trends or themes that could help you find your perfect match.

The popular dating app Tinder is using AI in an arguably invasive way by asking users permission to scan their camera rolls to detect key themes that could help daters find successful matches.

Photo Insights is yet another way companies are using AI to “personalize” the user experience.

Tinder’s feature requires users to opt in, which is good, as it doesn’t force AI functions on privacy-conscious users who don’t want their camera rolls invaded by a dating app.

Through a number of steps, Tinder will scan your camera roll directly on your device to analyze the content.

Tinder then generates insights using AI, which are based on themes and objects from the photos.

While this seems well and good, Tinder says that “select photos are temporarily uploaded to our server to generate your photo insight.”

It’s unclear how long the images will remain on Tinder's servers and whether those servers will be handled by Tinder directly or by a third party.

Regardless, if private images are uploaded to a company’s server, this could lead to breaches or data leaks.

The selection process, which images will be chosen by Tinder, is also unclear, so any image within your camera roll could be uploaded to its server.

“If you opt into this feature, we perform an on-device scan of your camera roll to identify photos that we think could produce relevant insights about you, based on photo quality, content, and similarity,” Tinder says.

“The identified photos are temporarily uploaded to Tinder’s servers and shared with our AI technology provider solely to create Photo Insights.”

These images will then be deleted from Tinder’s server unless the user plans to use them in their profile.

Tinder claims that photo insights that are not kept on the account will be deleted within 90 days.

Cybernews senior information security researcher, Aras Nazarovas, has said that this new feature raises several privacy concerns.

Tinder says it uses a third-party provider to handle its Photo Insights feature. However, the dating app doesn’t say who the third party is or what their privacy policies are.

“This can cause issues as users cannot verify that their photos are stored securely, that their photos are actually deleted after the insights are generated, or whether their photos will be used to train AI models or used for other purposes,” said Nazarovas.

Although Tinder claims to scan users’ images on their devices to ensure only high-quality photos that adhere to their terms of use and community guidelines are uploaded, there’s no guarantee that images that don’t adhere to such rules would not end up on Tinder’s servers or their providers.

“Apart from the obvious dangers of such a dataset potentially being compromised, it is also not clear if parts of profile data and identifiers would be shared with Tinder's AI technology provider. Such data could link individual photos with the actual identities of Tinder users,” Nazarovas warns.

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