Wednesday, April 6, 2016

If you're not paying for the service you're the product, not the customer

The dating site Tinder exposes a lot of information about people who sign up.  Lots of data:
Tinder isn’t as private as many of its users think, and a new website which aims to exploit that is causing concern among users of the dating app. 
Swipebuster promises to let Tinder users find out whether people they know have an account on the dating app, and even stalk them down to their last known location.
No hacking involved - Swipebuster uses Tinder's published API to get the data.  And this is interesting:
Although the site seems targeted at those who want to catch cheating partners on the app, its developer says he had a different motivation in mind, telling Vanity Fair that he wanted to highlight oversharing online. 
“There is too much data about people that people themselves don’t know is available,” the anonymous developer said. “Not only are people oversharing and putting out a lot of information about themselves, but companies are also not doing enough to let people know they’re doing it.”
Yup.


2 comments:

matism said...

I would offer a number of flavors of Linux as disproof of that theory. Just as I would offer any Microsoft product as disproof of its corollary, since even though you pay DEARLY for their products, you STILL are the product, not the customer.

It is a nice sentiment to keep in mind, however, if one considers using Facebook or Twitter or Tinder or any of the other such "essential" choices.

ASM826 said...

Absolutely true of health insurance.