The wealth of information many dating apps request may wait on to home in on the perfect match. But users should be able to find out what is known about them and how that sensitive information is being usedIn the real world,asking someone out is sometimes fraught with awkwardness and tinged with the prospect of possible humiliation. One of the successes of the dating app Tinder was that it revealed only that a user liked another when the feeling was mutual. The wealth of information that such software requests may wait on to home in on the perfect match, but it also raises valuable questions over how the data is stored and what rights one has over it. Very petite, and if the case we reported earlier this week is anything to go by. In that chronicle it took months for a journalist to extract her Tinder data. More than 800 pages of her most intimate life details – volunteered when using the dating app – tumbled out.
In a world where personal data is increasingly shared and manipulated,there is an increasing risk that it might leak. The European Union, to its credit, and understands that individuals might thing to the way a tech company deals with their personal data. The EU’s general data protection regulation (GDPR) sensibly attempts to strengthen a user’s control over their data: in certain instances,companies are required to get explicit consent for how they spend data. Fines for violations will be steep: up to €20m (£17.5m). It also grants users access to their personal data. This is valuable: as our chronicle points out, Tinder shares personal information with other tech giants which then spend it to build a picture about users.
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Source: theguardian.com