French journalist Judith Duportail asked Tinder for her data under European privacy law. She received 800 pages. Every message. Every swipe. Every login location. A list of her Facebook friends. Her interests. A secret score rating her desirability. Eight hundred pages on a single person — enough to reconstruct her entire romantic and sexual life. Tinder says it collects data "necessary to provide the service." Apparently, 800 pages is necessary.
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Tinder says everyone has a fair chance at love. They secretly rated every user with a desirability score. If you were rated low, you saw fewer attractive people and got fewer matches — a rigged system designed to make you feel inadequate enough to pay for premium features. CEO Sean Rad bragged about the algorithm's complexity. Tinder later said they moved away from ELO but admitted they still rate you. The casino changed the name of the game but kept the house edge.
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Tinder said it protects your safety. Its API leaked your GPS coordinates accurate to 100 feet — enough to find your apartment. ProPublica found that known sex offenders were active on Tinder's free tier because Match Group only ran background checks on paid users. If you couldn't afford the premium subscription, Tinder didn't check whether the person you were meeting had a conviction for sexual assault. Safety was a premium feature.
OkCupid promised to protect your personal data. The Norwegian government found it shipping your sexual orientation, drug use, and political views to 135 companies — Google, Facebook, and dozens of data brokers. Each packet included your GPS coordinates and device ID, so they knew exactly who you are and where you sleep. The Norwegian Consumer Council called it "out of control." When the government itself says your dating app is out of control, "committed to protecting" loses its meaning.
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OkCupid's co-founder wrote a blog post titled "We Experiment on Human Beings!" — with an exclamation mark, like it was fun. They deliberately told people they were 90% compatible when the algorithm said they weren't. Real people went on real dates, caught real feelings, based on numbers OkCupid knew were fake. His defense: "That's how websites work." Manipulating people's love lives to generate data is not how websites work. It's how research without consent works.
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OkCupid asks you hundreds of deeply personal questions. Have you used drugs? What's your sexual fantasy? How do you feel about abortion? You answer honestly because you think it helps find your match. Norway found those answers — tagged with your GPS coordinates and device ID — going to 135 advertising companies. The questions aren't for matching. They're the product. You thought you were looking for love. You were filling out the most intimate advertising survey ever designed.
Hinge says it's "designed to be deleted." It launched that slogan the same year its parent company went public on the stock market. Match Group told the SEC its entire business depends on keeping users. Hinge's revenue doubled to $400 million in two years. Every person who actually finds love and deletes the app costs Match Group up to $480 a year. The company that says it wants you to leave made $3.2 billion last year from people who didn't.
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Hinge says it's designed to help you find love. Behind the scenes, it secretly scores your desirability and decides who gets to see you. If you don't pay $30-50 a month, the algorithm buries your profile. Researchers found match quality deliberately gets worse over time — so you'll pay to fix it. The app "designed to be deleted" is actually designed to make you desperate enough to subscribe. Your love life is being A/B tested for revenue.
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Hinge says it takes your privacy seriously. It sends your data to Facebook, Google, and Kochava — a company the FTC sued for selling people's exact locations. Mozilla slapped Hinge with a privacy warning. Your dating photos get analyzed by AI. Your typing patterns are tracked. Your location is precise enough to identify your bedroom. And all of it flows to Match Group's other 40 dating brands. "Seriously" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The FTC sued Match.com for using fake love to sell subscriptions. Between 2016 and 2018, up to 30% of new accounts were scammers. Match knew this. They sent you emails anyway: "You caught his eye!" "Someone's interested!" You paid $240 a year to respond. The person wasn't real. Match's internal data showed these fake messages worked — people bought subscriptions to chase ghosts. The FTC: "Match conned people into paying via messages they knew were from scammers." You can't "find love" from accounts the company flagged as fraudulent.
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Signing up for Match.com takes four clicks. Cancelling takes six or more — through pages deliberately designed to make you give up. The FTC said Match "trapped consumers" in recurring charges. People reported being billed months after they thought they'd cancelled. Match made it easy to start paying and nearly impossible to stop. Four clicks to give them your money. Six clicks to try to get it back. That's not bad design. That's a business model.
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Match.com says it's committed to a safe community. The FTC found that a quarter to a third of new accounts were scammers. Match didn't just fail to stop them — it used their messages to sell subscriptions. "Someone's interested in you!" That someone was a fraud. Americans lost $1.3 billion to romance scams in 2022. Match.com turned scammer messages into revenue, then told users it was keeping them safe. The scammers were the sales team.