In ‘What Privacy Means’, Siddharth Sonkar explains how an Indian citizen’s privacy is hardly ‘private’.
W hen Judith Duportail, a freelance journalist, broke up with her boyfriend, she downloaded Tinder, the dating app. She began getting addicted to the app and in the course of using it, being a journalist, she became curious about how the app was helping her find matches. With the help of privacy activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye – the founder of Personal Data.IO, which aims to ensure data protection rights – she sent an email to Tinder asking it to show all the data it had on her.
How dating apps exploit India’s loosely formed definition of ‘personal information’
Soon, she was surprised when she received 800 pages of information – about her Facebook likes, links to her old Instagram pictures, ranking of the age group of men she was interested in, the number of friends she had on Facebook and where she had carried out each and every online conversation with her matches. She decided to write a book to describe her experience when exploring herself through Tinder called L’Amour sous algorithme (Love Under Algorithm). During this exploration, Duportail discovered that Tinder uses a desirability rank known as the ‘Elo Score’. To put it simply, the application ranks every profile to assess who is a better match for someone. Duportail’s book reveals that Tinder uses a matching process system and method patent, as it encourages dates between users with similar profiles. This system is capable of classifying users in relation to their intelligence, preferences, wealth, ethnicity, and attractiveness. Reportedly, Tinder rejected Duportail’s claims that it uses this patent, citing that this part of its application was irrelevant to the operability of its platform.
‘We don’t believe in stereotypes,’ said Tinder. However, according to Duportail, the story is quite different, pointing out that Orlando hookup sites Tinder collects information that is far more than what we ordinarily expect while using an app. Lees verder