Your Dating App Data Might Be Shared With the U.S. Government

In Slate Future Tense, Lauren Sarkesian and Spandana Singh explain how a lack of privacy protections can allow the data collected by dating apps to make its way to the U.S. Government through private commercial data brokers.

In the United States, user data collected by dating apps is also up for sale, via data brokers. Commercial data brokers are for-profit entities that aggregate private information by scraping the web and buying data from other companies (such as credit card companies). Although the data broker industry is booming, these companies often operate in the shadows. Today, they play a critical role in the data supply chain by compiling and selling our personal information, including our search histories, location data, and what businesses we visit the most, to anyone willing to pay for it. User location data is both among the most sensitive and most profitable data that data brokers compile and sell, leading to the growth of a new location data economy. Due to the lack of transparency surrounding these purchases, we largely do not yet know how many government entities are buying data from brokers, and which dating apps feed their data to those particular brokers. So unfortunately, it is not yet clear how pervasive this problem is, or which dating apps pose the most severe privacy risks.

In one example we do know about, Motherboard recently revealed that a data broker named X-Mode has been compiling geolocation data from popular Muslim dating app Muslim Mingle and selling this extremely private data to the U.S. military through defense contractors. The Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Internal Revenue Service have been caught using data brokers’ commercial databases with location information (though it’s unclear whether it was sourced from dating websites) to identify, track, arrest, and in ICE’s case, potentially even deport immigrants. Motherboard also identified another network of dating apps that have been sharing user location data with X-Mode, including Iran Social, Egypt Social, and Colombia Social.