Popular dating apps as OkCupid and Grindr share personal data of users, such as their sexuality and location, with about 100 other organizations, a Norwegian consumer group stated on Tuesday, as it filed a complaint about a breach of privacy policies.
The Norwegian Consumer Council discovered that 10 popular Android apps that gather sensitive data about sexual preferences, drug use, and health passed some of the data to marketing and advertising companies without clearly informing users. “These practices are out of hand what about a breach of European data protection legislation,” stated Finn Myrstad, director of digital policy, Norwegian Consumer Council.
It is impossible for users to handle this because the terms and conditions are very long and are impossible to understand, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Tech companies came less than improved scrutiny above data privacy, fuelled by 2018’s Cambridge Analytica scandal where tens of millions of Facebook profiles had been harvested without having their users’ consent.
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), heavily restricts companies’ potential to process and share private data with no users’ consent, with hefty fines for companies that break the rules.
The Norwegian Consumer Council filed a complaint against the U.S. based gay dating app Grindr on Tuesday and businesses getting data from it with Norway’s information authority, that stated it was looking at regardless of whether they’d broken GDPR rules.
Grindr said it rejected several of the report’s conclusions, incorporating which its privacy policy was shared with all users, that had individual command over what info they opted to give in their profiles.
As the data protection landscape continues to change, commitment to user privacy continues to be steadfast,” the company said in a declaration.
The council’s study discovered that the app, which is used by millions worldwide, shares information with a big selection of third parties concerned in profiling and advertising, some of which reserve the best to successfully pass it on to others.
“Sharing location information for people that are gay might be unsafe in some extreme circumstances,” Norway’s data safety commissioner Bjorn Erik Thon, said in a declaration.
There are still some that don’t wish to be open about their orientation, and there are lots of nations in the world in which being gay carries great risks.
The study even found that OkCupid shares data from users’ personal profiles associated with sexuality, political views and drug use with analytics firm, and the dating app Tinder shares location and age with advertising firms.
The Match Group, that owns Tinder and OkCupid, said in a statement that it used third-party providers to help its services but just shared data deemed important to run its platforms, in line with the appropriate laws.
Privacy is at the center of our business, the business said.
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