Dating Apps Selling Private User Data

On 14 January 2020, the report from the Norwegian Consumer Council, a non-profit organization, which is funded by the government, disclosed that numerous apps are sharing user data. The Agency researched 10 mobile apps and found that these apps collected valuable user data and shared it with several advertising companies. The data contained information like interests, habits, behaviors, gender, and age of the consumers and conjointly their GPS location and the IP address.

These days where it is hard to find real "love" or "companionship", people use dating apps to search out those things. Although it is not that popular in India it is very common for westerners to use these apps. However, these companies are violating laws by selling the sensitive personal information of their users, which is incredibly wrong and unethical.

According to the Norwegian Consumer Council, the dating apps such as Grindr, Tinder, and OkCupid were selling information that "can be used to target these users with ads, and to infer many highly sensitive infer attributes including sexual orientation and religious beliefs". These data mining seems to breach European laws that were there to safeguard consumers' information.

What that meant is that the ad companies may target the users with specified ads. It could be used to target and hurt people with different sexual preferences, or show ads associated with drugs to people struggling with drug abuse. Also, people having contrasting political views can be focused for an attack because they are exposed.