Panel at EU Parliament on dating apps

Hi, welcome on the blog of PerosnalData.IO. This week I gave a short talk at the European Parliament on dating apps at a conference organized by the trainees of the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS)*. I thought I would share some takeaways with you.

*What is the EDPS? His role is first to ensure that the EU institutions respect the rules they created (e.g. the new General Data Protection Regulation). And secondly, he has an important advisory role to lawmakers on data protection issues. You can find the EDPS on Twitter, and a more accurate description of what the office does here.

The name of the conference was Love at First Swipe, and coincidentally it was organized on the week of Valentine’s Day. So as speakers we were all prepared to talk about our dear friends from Tinder! Or more accurately one of many other dating services within the “Match Group”, a group that also includes Cupid, PlentyOfFish and dozens of other dating services.

I’d like to share some interesting things I heard, especially from fellow speakers Raegan MacDonald (Mozilla), Maryant Fernandez & Diego Naranjo (European Digital Rights), and finally Marijn Sax (PhD from Amsterdam University).

We talked of course about the risk that if you’re feeding Tinder’s algorithms with your thumb, you’re probably feeding the data assets (and quite some ‘GDPR’ liabilities) of those other companies in the Match group. And in case you’re wondering, Tinder refuses to clarify this point to its users beyond a mere reference to their privacy notice… Yes, one of those notices helping you understand what a company does with your data just as much as if you ask Prince Hamlet about the meaning of your life. And of course, from there anything is possible because, as Maryant and Diego from EDRi explained, your data also has a secret life, and it can get pregnant when it meets other data, producing even more data about you that you may not know about, which includes for example your “desirability” score that Tinder calculates to decide who is what they call your “perfect match”.

Another interesting remark I heard from Giovanni Buttarelli, the (EDP)Supervisor himself, is that Tinder’s objective is not really to find a perfect match for you because, if it worked, they would be out of business for a long time. Seems obvious, but we tend to forget thinking about where the incentives of those organizations are, as Raegan MacDonald, head of public affairs at Mozilla, explained. She went further reminding us that we’re in the so-called “attention” economy, in which companies compete for our eyeballs. And in such context those apps are designed to keep us hooked.

Should we tax addictive technologies?

I would like to think a step further about this issue, stepping out a little from what we discussed at the EU Parliament: apps are now designed like complex dopamine delivery interfaces, meant to hijack our brains and align our behaviours to the economic interests of firms behind those apps. And this is no obscure esoteric practice. This is the direct application of a larger research field called “persuasive tech” which is meant to develop computer-based techniques that can change the behaviours of millions of people. If you go on this website, the Captology Lab of Stanford University, you will see that they rightfully indicate this could improve the health of millions. If an app could help everyone to eat less junk food, indeed less people would suffer from diabetes. But the reality of how such research is applied is quite different.

Those “addictive” designs and technologies are used by applications such as Angry Birds or Tinder or and by many other companies.

Entrepreneurs go at Stanford to learn how they can leverage our brain vulnerabilities and create addictive products that move us through what they call a customer funnel. If we tax tobacco, alcohol and sugar because they can create addiction, shouldn’t we also tax those technologies?

On this front, Marijn Sax from Amsterdam University nicely illustrated how Tinder in fact replicates the same mechanics that made games like Candy Crush multi-million dollars operations, notably by exploiting our “fear of missing out”. This is what they do for example when pushing notifications such as “Tinder is now hot in your area” (so we really should reopen the app), or by telling us that there are “9 people who liked you” (so why don’t we upgrade to Tinder Gold to see them). And if we’re out of Tinder Boost, the app shows a reset countdown (usually 24h), hoping to get some extra money from the impatients of this world, exactly as Candy Crush and many other games do. Marijn also proposed an interesting way to look at how the app monetizes our right to privacy: they have different plans such as Tinder+, Tinder Gold, etc. And the more you pay, the more information you get, such as who “liked” you (even if you did not like them). So they set up a dynamic in which you can buy others’ privacy to gain an advantage over other participants. It’s as if Facebook would offer a suscription model where you can see other users’ pictures even when their privacy settings are on. Many may find this dishonest. Tinder finds this perfectly normal. I wonder if this is not simply illegal.

I hope you enjoyed the reading. If you did, please give me dopamine shot by liking the story below. And as always thanks in advance for your reaction and thoughts! I’m Jérôme Groetenbriel, the co-founder of PersonalData.IO, as startup promoting trust in the digital world.

The full recording of the conference is available below.