How do I contact Tinder’s Data Protection Officer?
What are Safe Message Filters?
Profiling and automated decision-making at Tinder
I have another question about my data
How do I contact Tinder’s Data Protection Officer?
If you are a Tinder user located in the European Economic Area, Switzerland or the UK, you may contact Tinder’s Data Protection Officer (“DPO”) directly by postal mail at the address listed in Section 12 of Tinder’s Privacy Policy or by using our contact form here. Select “I have another question about my data” from the privacy drop down options and include in the description field that you wish to contact the “Data Protection Officer” or “DPO”.
Why does Tinder ask for consent to filter messages for safety purposes as a European Economic Area or UK user?
If you are a user located in the European Economic Area or the UK, this is done in order to comply with local law relating to our operation of important safety features.
Tinder is committed to the safety of our users and uses automated technology to filter messages and video calls for malicious or illegal activity that violates our Terms of Use or Community Guidelines. When this type of activity is detected or reported on our platform, our staff may review the content, taking appropriate action when necessary, to help keep the Tinder community safe.
What are Safe Message Filters?
Your safety is a top priority to us. It is at the core of the way we design, build and provide our services to you, including features you use to interact with others on Tinder like chat. To help keep you safe, we use a combination of automated tools and trained human agents to review these interactions and act against those who are engaging in harmful or illegal behavior. See below a description of some of the actions we take to help keep you safe:
- To find instances of harmful or illegal behavior, we use automated tools to scan interactions happening on Tinder and also enable you and other users to report such behavior to us.
- Once an issue is raised through a user report or our automated tools, our trained agents can review interactions between users as needed to investigate the matter and decide on the actions to take, which may include removing content, banning the user and/or notifying the appropriate law enforcement resources.
- As part of our continuous efforts to improve the safety of our users, we use interactions between users to evaluate, train and improve our automated tools.
Profiling and automated decision-making at Tinder
At Tinder, your privacy is a top priority. It is at the core of the way we design and build the services and products you know and love, so that you can fully trust them and focus on building meaningful connections.
As part of our commitment to transparency in the way we process your information, we explain here what automated decision-making and profiling are, why it is at the very heart of our service (in fact, it’s probably the reason you love using our products!) and how you benefit from it.
What is automated decision-making and profiling?
Various privacy laws in the US and around the world address automated decision-making and profiling. For example, Europe’s data protection framework, the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), provides the following definitions:
- Automated individual decision-making: making a decision about an individual solely by automated means (i.e., using computers and algorithms only, without any human involvement in the decision-making process);
- Profiling: evaluating certain things about an individual, including interests, preferences or behavior, through an automated processing of personal data (e.g., using computers and algorithms to determine someone’s interests based on his or her online behavior).
Does Tinder rely on automated decision-making or profiling?
Automated decision-making and profiling are invisible features that are at the core of the services you know and love, upon which we constantly improve and without which we would be unable to help you build meaningful connections. We use these features for the following reasons:
To help connect you with other users.
We use the information you and other members of the Tinder community provide us directly or through your use of the service (including, for example, age, gender, location, interests, and your Like and Nopes) to power our proprietary matching algorithm and recommend compatible people to you. We use the same process to recommend you to other users. Social factors such as race, ethnicity, income and religion do not play any role in our algorithm.
Of course, you can also always change your discovery settings to filter profiles which are shown to you on Tinder.
See our Powering Tinder® blogpost for more information on the method behind our matching system.
To show you ads and offers that may be of interest to you.
We use information about you to show you useful and relevant ads on and off our service and measure the effectiveness of these ads. We also use information about you to deliver offers and discounts tailored to your profile.
To promote safety and security.
We use automated decision-making and profiling as part of our moderation efforts (for example, removing bots), as well as to promote the safety and security of our users by making it easier to prevent illegal and unauthorized actions from happening and to swiftly and efficiently detect and fight those actions when they happen.
This processing may lead to suspension or account closure for users who are reported or found to engage in illegal or unauthorized activities, both on and off our services, without prejudice to other legal actions we could take.
I have another question about my data
Our Privacy Policy and this FAQ may answer some of your questions. These are two of the best resources for anything data-related, but if you happen to find your question unanswered, please feel free to contact us.
Learn more
See our Privacy Policy to learn more about how we process personal data (Section 4 - “How We Use Data”) and your rights (Section 8 - “Your Rights”). If you close your account, your data will be retained only for limited purposes and then deleted, as described in our Privacy Policy ( Section 9 - “How Long We Retain Your Data”).