What Your Dating App Knows About You (And Who They're Selling It To)

You swiped right. You shared some photos. Maybe you filled out a bio, connected your Instagram, and turned on location services. It felt harmless — that’s the point.

But behind every profile is a data pipeline. And dating apps are among the worst offenders in the consumer app space when it comes to what they collect, how long they keep it, and who they sell it to.

Here’s what’s actually happening with your data — and what you can do about it.

The Data You Know You’re Sharing

When you sign up for a dating app, you hand over the obvious stuff:

• Name, age, gender, sexual orientation
• Photos (usually multiple)
• Location (precise GPS, not just your city)
• Email address and phone number
• Bio, employer, school, interests

Most people understand this. You can’t get matched without sharing something. But this is just the surface layer.

The Data You Don’t Know You’re Sharing

Dating apps collect far more than what you put in your profile.

Behavioral data. Every swipe, every message, every time you open the app. How long you look at a profile. What time of day you’re active. What types of people you engage with. One journalist requested her data from Tinder and received an 800-page report. It included the age range of men she was interested in, the words she used most frequently, and a detailed log of her in-app behavior.

Device data. Your phone model, operating system, IP address, mobile advertising ID, and sensor data. This lets advertisers track you across every app on your phone — not just the dating one.

Facial geometry. Tinder stores facial geometry data when you go through identity verification. Bumble retains this biometric data for up to three years. That’s longer than most relationships.

Third-party connections. If you linked Instagram, Spotify, or Facebook, the dating app now has a bridge to those data sets too. Your social graph, your music taste, your photo history — all connected.

Who’s Buying This Data

This is where it gets dark.

Data brokers. Dating apps share user data with advertising companies and data brokers. Grindr sold location data to ad networks from 2017 to 2020. OkCupid shared users’ sexuality, drug use, and political views with an analytics company. Match Group — which owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, and Match.com — has the ability to share data across its entire portfolio of apps.

Advertisers. In 2021, Norway’s Data Protection Authority fined Grindr over $7 million for sharing user data — including age, gender, location, and the fact that someone used Grindr (which can reveal sexual orientation) — with advertising partners without proper consent.

Religious organizations. A Catholic group based in Colorado spent millions purchasing data from Grindr, Scruff, Growlr, Jack’d, and OkCupid from data brokers. They used it to cross-reference location data with church residences in an effort to identify and out gay priests.

Government agencies. The U.S. military purchased location data from the Muslim dating app Muslim Mingle through the data broker X-Mode. The Department of Homeland Security, ICE, CBP, and the IRS have all been caught using commercially purchased location databases — effectively bypassing the warrant requirements established in Carpenter v. United States.

Researchers with questionable ethics. A programmer scraped 40,000 profile photos from Tinder to create a facial recognition dataset. Danish researchers publicly released the data of 70,000 OkCupid users, including location and sexual preferences. When asked if they considered anonymizing the data, one researcher replied that the data was already public.

Your Photos Are the Biggest Risk

Most people don’t think about this, but the photos you upload to a dating app don’t stay on that dating app.

Profile photos can be scraped by anyone and fed into facial recognition databases. Once a photo of your face is indexed by a tool like PimEyes or Clearview AI, it can be used to find every other photo of you online — even photos you didn’t upload yourself.

This means a single dating profile photo can become the key that unlocks your real name, your employer, your home address, and your social media accounts — even if your dating profile uses a nickname and doesn’t list any of that information.

What “Deleting” Your Account Actually Does

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most dating apps don’t actually delete your data when you delete your account.

Deleting the app from your phone does nothing. Your account and all its data remain on the company’s servers. Even if you go through the in-app account deletion process, companies often retain data for “legitimate interests” — a catch-all phrase that can mean almost anything.

A 2023 study by Mozilla found that 52% of dating apps failed to meet minimum security standards, and 52% had experienced a data breach, leak, or hack in the past three years.

What You Can Do Right Now

1. Delete accounts you’re not using. Don’t just uninstall the app. Log in, submit a data deletion request, wait for confirmation, then delete the account through the app’s official process.

2. Submit formal data deletion requests. If you’re in California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, or another state with a consumer privacy law, you have a legal right to demand deletion. Contact Match Group at privacy@match.com, Bumble at DPO@bumble.com, or Grindr at privacy@grindr.com. Cite the specific statute.

3. Disable ad tracking on your phone. On iPhone: Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking > turn off “Allow Apps to Request to Track.” On Android 12+: Settings > Privacy > Ads > Delete advertising ID. This single toggle eliminates one of the largest data-sharing vectors.

4. Disconnect linked accounts. Remove Instagram, Spotify, and Facebook connections from your dating profiles. Each link expands the data surface exponentially.

5. Minimize your profile. Remove your employer, school, and other identifying information unless it’s essential. Use photos that don’t appear anywhere else online.

6. Use approximate location. If the app allows it, switch from precise GPS to approximate location. Six of the top fifteen dating apps leak precise enough location data that someone can calculate your exact address through a technique called trilateration.