Dating Apps: Data Collection and Capitalizing on Connection

I must have deleted and recreated my Hinge account at least five times by early June of this year. Like many others, I'd experienced years of frustration and exhaustion with dating, but felt like I had few options to meet people outside of dating apps. However, something was different this time around. My app did not let me complete the account at the final step, after I declined to complete a facial verification scan. I got an error message. I believed it was some kind of glitch, and thought it would be fixed soon enough. However, I instead got an email the next day explaining that I had been banned from Hinge and my account was removed. 

I was confused. I had heard anecdotally that people may get banned if someone reports them, whether or not they were actually in the wrong or violated Hinge's terms. The appeals process is also opaque; Hinge does not give specific details to users about why they are banned. Some have noted they remain banned despite their insistence they had done nothing wrong and a pending appeal which has gone on for years. I, however, had just tried to make a new account and hadn't even gotten to complete the process. I didn't know how I could have breached the terms or otherwise had reason to have my account removed. 

I reached out to Hinge's customer service email to ask why. I received a response saying that "to complete [their] appeal investigation," they needed to "verify my identity." "ID verification shows our Trust & Safety team that you are who you say you are, and that you are not impersonating someone else," they said. They sent a link to submit a scan of my government-issued identification with the "AI-powered identity intelligence" platform Jumio to do so. 

I was surprised by this. Why would they need both a facial verification scan and a copy of my ID card? These are both sensitive pieces of information. At this moment, governments around the world have been unrolling forms of facial verification for social media use, claiming it is for children's protection, though suspected to be a means for mass-scale surveillance and compulsory data extraction from millions of people. This request coming from a private company, too, with no clear explanation as to why they needed the information, how they would use it, and how long they would hold it, seemed fishy to me. I ended up not submitting my ID at the time. 

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Dating apps are a vast market. While online dating has existed since the '90s, dating apps like Tinder exploded in the mid-2010s, with the number of people using online dating skyrocketing. Tinder was seen as a way to expedite the confusing and time-consuming dating process–it allowed you to choose people you were attracted to based on their pictures and bio, giving you thousands of eligible people to swipe on at your fingertips. It gamified dating, too, making it quick, convenient, and even entertaining. Tinder was known for non-serious flings, however. For those wanting more serious or long-term connections, Hinge came into the market. First an underdog compared to Tinder, Hinge also exploded in popularity. Both came to be acquired by Match Group, a dating app conglomerate which owns 60 percent or more of the online dating market. The publicly-traded company reports millions upon millions of users around the world, representing billions of dollars of revenue. 

Many have noted the growing pains and issues that come with online dating. First, it seemed "catfishing" (or using pictures that are misrepresentative) was common. Then, it seemed the apps were overrun by spam, either people attempting dating scams or what users think are bot accounts, whose uses are not fully known. Meanwhile, the novelty of online dating wore off, as it was criticized for being impersonal, dehumanizing, and mentally exhausting. People noted that Hinge's model is a contradiction–if someone achieves a long-term relationship, that is two potential customers it loses. It could therefore lose money from the many paid options it includes in the app, not only subscription tiers, but also things like "boosts" or "roses" which are meant to increase your dating odds. Why would Hinge want their app to be successful in its purpose, then?

There is more to this story, however. For years, dating apps have followed the model of a free account with subscription tiers. Over time, they have made the experience for non-paying users worse, with ads, limits, or blocks on seeing information, to cajole paid app use. They have also promised more success and more reach to paying users. While the apps made billions of dollars in revenue this way, it seemed they had also been sitting on a more lucrative goldmine this entire time: users' personal data. 

Dating apps are a wealth of users' identifying data, known in the marketing world as extremely valuable. This information, like your demographics (age, sex, location, income level) and consumer habits, is what advertisers and companies need to tailor ads and maximize their sales and profits. In recent years, big box stores from David's Bridal to Target have realized that the accounts they have on customers are an invaluable data source and can be used to very accurately predict what a consumer would purchase. A famous story from over a decade ago involves a teenager with a Target account who was recommended items for babies, likely before buying pregnancy-related products or being open about her pregnancy. Target's consumer profile on her, along with their data on the consumption trends of pregnant people, pieced together her condition regardless and alerted her father to the pregnancy via coupons for baby products it sent to her. The sophistication of data collection has likely only increased since that time, which is particularly alarming given the criminalization of abortion, surveillance pricing, and the other ways our consumption data can be weaponized against us. 

Dating apps have vast amounts of data on their users, which users themselves provide. This gets around a common issue with data collection: raw datasets that are too vast and need to be labeled or categorized to be useful for big data analysis needed for things like surveillance. Because users often provide details about themselves, like their age, professions, and hobbies, attached to their name and demographic data, this can provide essential categorizations to make a useful and profitable dataset. Now with facial scans and potential ID checks, this dataset could become even more powerful, not only in consumer sales, but also to a larger cash cow: governments bent on monitoring their populations. This could explain Match Group's ties to Palantir, known to be a pioneer in big data and AI-driven surveillance. 

I couldn't help but wonder if this is why Hinge was so bent on a facial scan and an ID check. I did some research and found that Hinge did, indeed, announce a plan in February of this year to make facial verification scans mandatory across their platform in multiple countries around the world. Match Group is also expanding this to other apps in their portfolio, which would represent the vast majority of the online dating market. This would vastly increase revenues for dating app companies, even as users flee the apps themselves from "dating fatigue." As the saying goes, if something is free, you are the product; it would follow that, like social media platforms, online dating would follow the same business model. In an interview with CNN in June of this year, Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos said that Hinge does not monetize users for advertising, but also that the vast majority of users are free users. It begs the question of how Hinge plans to make revenue. 

A report from the Mozilla Foundation highlighted in 2024 that dating app companies, including those owned by Match and Bumble, are not being upfront with users about whether they sell user data. The report noted that at least 25 percent of the apps it researched collect metadata from the content users upload, using "third-party partners" to analyze the data collected. This, the report noted, is odd, given that users are already asked for information in creating profiles. Why would data be mined from users so many times? 

Hinge's list of third-party "data recipients" is large and ranges from OpenAI to Google. It notes the type of data it collects for users and its justification for why on its website, from "Face Geometry Data" to "Geolocation Data." On its "Privacy" page, it used to claim it did not sell users' personal data. Now, however, it says "[i]f you live in the United States, some of the activities described…may constitute 'targeted advertising,' 'sharing,' or 'selling' under applicable laws." This is a disclaimer meant to address consumer protection laws in some U.S. states, like California's Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA). Hinge now has a dedicated page to disclose what the CCPA requires, and it portrays a more detailed picture of the scale and scope of users' data collected and how it is used by the company or sold. While users can opt out of data collection for Targeted Advertising, "Sales," and "Sharing" under laws like the CCPA, it is not yet clear what would protect users from data sharing or selling to governments or for other surveillance purposes. 

While there are some reasons to justify information sharing, like in the event a user harasses others or does something illegal, the infrastructure being built out here is too unwieldy and unregulated at this moment. Privacy experts and the Mozilla Foundation's project "Privacy Not Included" have sounded the alarm about dating apps and broader surveillance and data collection trends for over a decade now. Now that governments and corporations are encroaching more on our personal consumption and our lives, it seems more are understanding why our data should be more protected. Imagine a health insurer seeing your self-reported recreational drinking or drug use habits from Hinge and raising your premiums. Imagine your government taking note of your political affiliation or your answers to some prompts and flagging you for further surveillance. This is not far from what is currently happening right now. 

What would a modern tech company be without newly-announced and likely over-valued AI features? The popular dating apps have all announced their own, to some effect. Bumble, one of the few that is not owned by Match, appears to have gone all in on AI. It announced earlier this year that it would be making some form of agentic AI feature, wherein AI profiles created by user-supplied data would interact with each other, matching without user involvement in the process. This, which has been compared to an actual plot from futuristic dystopian series Black Mirror, would seemingly exacerbate the impersonal and dehumanizing nature of the apps. It also poses another large data security risk, as it would ostensibly require a lot of self-reported personal data to create the agent profile. Still, some have claimed they would welcome such a feature, as dating (along with every aspect of modern life) has become exhausting. Why not outsource dating, like any other task, to an AI agent?

This is the crux of the dating app issue. Dating apps position themselves as being an improvement from traditional dating, which is messy, time-consuming, and complicated. In other words, it's human. However, the apps posit using a capitalist method to address problems created by capitalism itself. I am reminded of an essay from Erin Williams' "Casual Intimacies" series, "The Cost of Casual Sex," wherein she explained something of a political economy of casual dating. 

"Like money in Marx's account, orgasm becomes an abstract unit of value, bodies become interchangeable instruments for producing sensation, and people appear to one another as temporarily useful pleasure functions. This is described as liberation. Everyone is free and autonomous. Everyone is detachable. But equality inside a market presumes that participants arrive with equal power, equal risk, and equal insulation from loss. They do not."

Dating apps, too, flatten the human experience into something that can fit neatly into lives dominated by work. Dating app companies capitalize on the loneliness prompted by our work-consumed lives and may now be double-dipping from users, seizing our data for further profit extraction. As a noted issue with AI companies, these are private, and mostly unregulated entities with vast amounts of power and little to no democratic oversight. Much like the underlying reason behind rapid AI data center expansion, there is also a corporate-state-aligned interest in expanding mass surveillance under fascism and building the capacities necessary to process data gathered. Dating apps could be fueled now by the inter-corporate competition for lucrative government contracts, which would mean further profiting from the exploitation of our data. Dating apps, a seemingly commonplace part of our current digital culture, could be linked to surveillance and potential repression, ramping up around the world. 

I don't think dating apps should be completely written off. I, like many, have heard the various success stories. Some people do enjoy casual dating with the apps; some people have met their life partners on the apps. And Pandora's box has already been opened. I don't think online dating will go anywhere, as about 30 percent of Americans say they use the apps now, even given dating fatigue and burnout. But the critiques of their dehumanizing nature and their link to people's inability to find time and spaces to connect outside of work are valid. If we had enough money, third spaces, and leisure time to meet people, we wouldn't need to rely as much on apps. And if we valued community outside of transactional experiences in a way that is less capitalistic, we could form more organic connections, whether romantic or platonic. 

I did ultimately end up sending my ID scan to Hinge via the platform Jumio, not really because I wanted to use Hinge again. I had already spent a month without it and realized it did not add anything to my life. Instead, I wanted to ask Hinge customer service if I had broken their terms or what justification they had in banning me. They insisted on the ID submission for me to do so. A few weeks later, I was notified that they reviewed my appeal and reauthorized my usage of the app. I was not given any details as to why I had been banned in the first place and was still made to submit a face scan. I wanted to document how unclear this process is and how seemingly arbitrary these decisions are being made. People's dating profiles, now a vast part of their social worlds and also a window into their personal data, are being controlled in this manner. My takeaway would be, as the Mozilla Foundation suggests, limiting the data the platforms keep on you (their report lists ways to do this). But ultimately, in an ideal world, we need to be thinking more broadly: Could we expropriate or democratize dating apps, making them a regulated public good, as people have suggested for social media platforms? Better yet, we could be building out communities and pushing for societal changes that enable us to meet and connect in a more human way.