> Even though it did not have any business relationship with OkCupid, the third-party data recipient asked the company to share large datasets of OkCupid user photos and related data with it because OkCupid’s founders were financial investors in the third party. OkCupid provided the third party with access to nearly three million OkCupid user photos as well as location and other information without placing any formal or contractual restrictions on how the information could be used, the FTC alleged.

I wonder what is this third party that the complaint does not list by name?

"In September 2014, the CEO of Clarifai, Inc. e-mailed one of OkCupid’s founders requesting that Humor Rainbow give Clarifai, Inc. (i.e., the Data Recipient) access to large datasets of OkCupid photos."

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/OkCupid-MatchCo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarifai#Military_work

And apparently also your deodorant, Assassin's Creed, and tabloid rags as well. That's what I call variety.

Outstanding observation! Class action suit in the making. Only lawyers get rich, but still could hurt the offenders financially.

Reuters says it is "Clarifai" if you wanted to know.

https://www.reuters.com/world/match-group-settles-us-ftc-cla...

I'm not sure privacy violations are the biggest concern here.

Clarifai's usecase is around unstructured image data search which is fairly useful in cleansing and less so in targeting.

More fundamentally, almost the entire tech industry touched Project Maven - it was massive. And that was just 1 of multiple initiatives led by the DoD.

And most other great and regional powers like China, Russia, Japan, France, India, South Korea, Turkiye, etc have all been working on similar projects for a decade.

It doesn't matter what country you live in - no nation will leave capabilities on the table. Heck, a highschooler with knowledge of OpenCV and the Google Earth API can build targeting capabilities similar to what superpowers had a decade ago.

It's 2026 - the Ukraine War started in 2014; the Syrian, Libyan, and Yemeni Civil Wars in 2011; the Congo War reignited in 2015; the Afghan War continued until 2022; the Myanmar Civil War reignited in 2021; etc - there has now been over a decade of constant development of dual use technologies in both conflicts and civilian applications.

Technology has always had a military component - heck, much of the "civilian" technologies in the 1990s-2000s were refined and tested thanks to Gulf War 1 and the Yugoslav Wars.

I signed up for eHarmony with a unique email address dedicated to that site. After wasting 6 months, I chose to delete my account.

Lo and behold, soon spam started to show up on this account, as if the floodgates had been opened. It was a unique account that I had not used anywhere else just for this specific reason, and my hunch was justified.

Lo and behold, soon spam started to show up on this account, as if the floodgates had been opened.

Facebook is also guilty of this.

I set up a Facebook account for a relative around 2006. The e-mail address is name_facebook@ a domain that I control.

Every six months or so, Facebook will send out almost daily e-mails for a month saying "Person x commented on your post!" or some variant. You know how I know this relative of mine didn't make a new post?

He's been dead since 2011.

Surprised it took this long to get litigation. So many people complaining about how crap dating sites are, but no one thought to realize the site itself was the problem and fell into the whole "looksmaxxing" grift. Some people really will do anything except admit that rich people are corrupt.

> The FTC said OkCupid users were never told their information - including nearly 3 million photos, demographic information and location data - would be shared in 2014 with Clarifai, a facial recognition technology company, contrary to OkCupid's privacy policies.

When I signed up for Match, about ten minutes into the process my account suddenly changed to that of another man including different photo, descriptions, orientation etc. I don't know why this happened but it was absolutely mortifying and an outrage Match did this. I dread to think how shit their code has to be to somehow merge accounts or whatever happened. I deleted "my" account immediately.

I imagine that counts as excessive sharing of personal data.

I've been out of the dating scene for 16 years now, but based on what I see on social media, I think online dating sucks today for three reasons.

1. Many men (Not all, but many) are there simply because they want to get laid. They're not looking for a relationship, they're looking for a hook-up, and they're not honest about their intentions. It doesn't help that people argue over whether Tinder is a dating app or a hook-up app.

2. I'm not sure how to put this without seeming misogynistic, but some women greatly over-value themselves. Or at the very least, they have out-dated ideas of courtship. Some of them expect to be taken out to $50+/plate restaurants on a first date, while many men think women are just trying to score free meals. It's hard to make relationships kick off when they begin so adversarial.

3. Dating sites/apps have a financial incentive for your relationship to fail. They can give you matches they know are bad since it keeps you as a serial dater and on their app. They're in a sticky spot where their most successful customer is one that they will never see another dime from, and there's not really a way around it.

> Puts a disclaimer before criticizing pathological behavior of some women

Nothing will improve until we as men stop gatekeeping ourselves from stating facts openly, without apologies. Women can be very shitty, often are, and that has to be said without the need to preface it or soften the blow.

naive question: why has no one made an app with the reverse incentive structure? i understand that the current business model is much more lucrative...but i feel like with how fed up people are with the inability of modern online dating to provide quality, long-lasting relationships a new platform that optimizes for match quality and longevity would eat all of Match Groups offerings lunches. i guess there just isn't enough money to be made so it's not even worth it?

They used to have a sister site. The had these kind of hilarious animated ads that made the whole thing seem so logical. One ad targeted at women and the other at men, both claiming that money meant you only got serious requests. I wish I could find those ads, they were classic.

You've identified the problem but failed to adequately describe a solution.

The matchmakers need to make money, even to just pay for the costs of running the service.

A monthly subscription to use the service creates the perverse incentive to give bad matches. A one-time fee makes unsuccessful users feel cheated out of their money. A "pay us once you get married" option is ripe for abuse.

Even if the service is free and paid for by selling ads, you'd run into the same problem of the subscription model: They'd be incentivized to keep you perpetually single so you see more ads.

1. Network effects. An app isn't like a new local business where people will naturally wander in. They may already exist but the market's captured everyone on the skinner box services

2. App stores. The deeper you look into the things needed to advertise as a mobile app, the more obvious it becomes. You need milliions up front just to be featured in your critical launch time. If you don't, you fall into #1 and it's hard to recover from the "it's so empty" early impressions.

3. As you said, any success despite #1 and #2 is destined to fail. ad won't make that money up, so the only viable idea is relying on a premium or subscription model. But paid models in the era of "free" mobile apps is a hard sell unless you can guarantee success. And dating is anything but guaranteed.

That said other models have been tried to correct the issues with the big apps. Limiting matches, reversing the gender dynamics, based around special interests, etc. The only one I think I saw any kind of success from is one tailored towards rich/famous people meeting other rich/famous people (surprise, surprise).

In fairness, this is not at all exclusive to online dating.

My experience with OKCupid was that women must lie to get laid, moreso than men. A man can state "just want sex" on his profile and it is socially neutral. A woman who posts such a thing has social consequences.

Hrm...

Honestly, that's fine. The issue was when the "get laid" app suddenly decided to be the "find serious relationship" app. Makes about as much sense as Roblox thinking about a dating app, but I guess the MBA's told them it brings more monies.

> but some women greatly over-value themselves.

It's overblown, but the high level concept of "women are picky" the inevitable course of nearly all dating aspects. Evolutionary wise, women need to be picky due to their long gestation period, and men aren't as picky because they can copulate with dozens of women over the course of days. Add in a caste system and the pareto principle, and even scenes from millenia ago aren't as different from 2026 Tinder as you'd think.

But of course your last point only polarizes this existing natural phenomenon.

>Dating sites/apps have a financial incentive for your relationship to fail.

This is why we needed to litigate these sites yesterday. But we were too busy fighting amongst ourselves, like serfs warring in the streets while the kings sit in an ivory tower. This is an issue only regulation can fix. The human element shouln't be sold off to capitalism, especially in this time where people are supposedly concerned about falling birth rates.

> Do something more casual first time around. Bar, coffee/walk, whatever.

The problem with that is there are women that will scoff at a man trying to do something casual like coffee, tea, or ice cream for a first date. They want to be wined and dined and treated like a princess right off the bat. They think they're a prize to be won simply by being a woman.

Though I truly believe that most women are not like this. However, some are, and their attitude is probably what keeps them perpetually single.

You clearly think it’s poor behavior so why are you worried about striking out with them?

The point is really that there's an expectation mismatch around costs that shrinks everyone's pool of daters.

For actual numbers in Canada, the Globe and Mail recently commissioned a survey showing about 47% of singles would not be willing to spend more than 50 CAD (36 usd) on a first date - and that 24% of singles think the man should pay, compared to 0.2% of singles thinking the woman should pay. So you can see the mismatch if you think about the Venn diagrams there.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-is-canada-facin...

Let them live their lives. I guarantee you they are not dying alone or whatever mortal curse you wish to invoke.

I can tell you from experience that it's a lot scarier to date men.

the definition requires "contempt", but it has been diluted to mean any statement that merely points out of corrosive behavior

additionally, many of the statements are actually class based and not inherently gendered, for example, we would call out a man trying to date for free meals too, but since its seen in contexts about women, its stated in reference to that gender, masquerading as contempt and misogyny, but not highlighting what is in the observer's heart and mind whatsoever.

never heard or thought about this before, but it kind of makes sense for a dating app. its one of the only levers available to them to attempt any sort of balance between user genders. it sucks for everyone (including the users) if the male:female ratio is like 20:1 or whatever.

i would rather pay a couple of extra dollars, relative to the opposite sex, if it meant access to a wider pool of potential matches.

No idea how these businesses operate now. I'm sure there's still sliding scales of sliminess based on the quality of the club and its management.

whatever more accurate numbers you want to substitute in there is fine, the point remains the same.

To be more explicit: you're paying extra to give more porn bots access to your inbox.

(Sincere question, not snark)

Google ? Meta ? Microsoft ? Oh, i see, they pay well.

They were heavily involved in researching what factors more reliably led to not just better matches, but better relationships -- when you disabled your account, they'd ask if it was because you'd met someone through OkC and ask you to pick who, if you were willing to share.

I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale. Trying to understand what messaging strategies worked better or worse could be a major part of figuring out how to improve matches.

Like, one obvious factor could be to match people who send lots of long messages with lots of questions with each other, while a separate set matches people who's messaging style is one sentence at a time. I'm not saying that would necessarily work well, but it's not crazy to research if NLP analysis of messages can produce additional potential compatibility signals.

The whole point of OkC back then was to try to develop as many data-based signals as possible to improve matches.

[1] https://blog.photofeeler.com/okcupid-is-wrong-about-smiling-...

"the odds are good, but the goods are odd" may apply here

I think the "only thing" that would make me cherry-pickable from their data is that I used an autoclicker to give everyone a 5 star... I have mixed feelings about doing that, but I got a couple (surprisingly nice) dates out of it that never went anywhere.

Because everyone else is "allowed" to misrepresent its privacy policies.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/facebook-agrees-pay-...

Proposed settlement: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/MatchGroupAmeri...

>"As part of a settlement, OkCupid [...] will be prohibited from misrepresenting its privacy policies."

>"Under the proposed settlement, OkCupid and Match are permanently prohibited from misrepresenting or assisting others in misrepresenting: [...]"

every company should already be "prohibited from misrepresenting its privacy policies" and the collection/controls stuff.

12 years, including intentional obstruction of the ftc investigation, and we get "please dont do that again". (dad voice: im not surprised, just disappointed)

To be fair, the complaint only alleges one instance of data transfer, so it's unclear whether the privacy violations were actually occurring for 12 years.

Claims that they were engaging in "intentional obstruction of the ftc investigation" are also unsupported beyond the false statements they made to the media and the users. It's like if your nemesis died under mysterious circumstances, a journalist asked you whether you killed him, you said no, and it turned out you did. Is it a lie? Yeah. Could it be reasonably characterized as "intentional obstruction of police investigation"? Hardly.

i wasnt clear in my comment, but i meant it in the sense of "12 years to resolve this one incident".

>Claims that they were engaging in "intentional obstruction of the ftc investigation" are also unsupported beyond the false statements they made to the media and the users.

i am not particularly inclined to take OkCupids side here, and will default to accepting the FTCs allegation.

Yeah you're right. The part about obstructing the investigation was in the press release but I was only looking at the complaint.

IAC had owned Match.com for a while and then developed Tinder from scratch.

Match didn't buy Tinder. Tinder was always part of the same company from day one.