Melanie Ehrenkranz is a writer who’s been featured in Gizmodo, Vice’s Motherboard, Medium’s OneZero blog and more. This article is part of our Privacy Not Included buyers guide for 2021. Follow her work and check out more from Privacy Not Included here.
Existing on a dating app means strangers are going to learn some personal things about you: your face, your job, your age, your height, where you live, where you’re from, your religion, if you smoke or drink, what you listen to. To name a few. Of course, you get to cherry pick what people see at first swipe, but it’s a vulnerable game. With the stream of anxieties that come with dating online (do I look cute? is this person going to murder me at a second location?), wondering how a massive corporation is shilling your data shouldn’t be one of them.
But if you’re registering with a dating app using your Facebook profile—rather than your phone or email—you’re creating a bridge between a place to build intimacy and/or get laid, and a company famous for prioritizing profit over privacy. So it’s worth understanding what exactly that tradeoff means.
When you login to a dating app with Facebook—an account independent system—rather than your phone or email, you’re logging in through what’s called a single sign-on. As Elissa Redmiles, faculty member and research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems who focuses on privacy and security, said, when you login through single sign-on, “you give not only the app, but also third-parties that the app has integrated with, access to certain Facebook data. So, while you will know what information you’re sharing, you will not know who you’re sharing it with.”
There might be a few benefits of using Facebook as your dating app login—mainly, weeding out first connections from showing up as possible matches. Maybe you don’t want to see your first cousin pop up while you’re swiping; maybe you don’t want a family member or ex to see your dating profile in their own feed. As Redmiles pointed out, some apps will also show you how many mutual Facebook friends you have. That might help ease your mind re: the aforementioned murdery inquiries. Knowing someone is only one or two degrees from your inner circle can offer some peace of mind.
“A lot of people didn’t want their profiles to be seen by friends, family, people they work with, they wanted to use dating apps to get to know strangers who they might have romantic compatibility with, and in order to assess that, you want to share sensitive details about yourself,” Camille Cobb, a postdoctoral researcher in the CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University who researched people’s expectations of privacy with online dating, said. “Things you wouldn’t share with friends and family.”
On the flip side, Redmiles said, there’s still little transparency around exactly what information tied to your dating profile and the way you’re using it are being shared with Facebook (and, by extension, third-party trackers). Even Facebook’s own post on the topic doesn’t really expand much on the ripple effect of what happens to your data once you login to an app through Facebook. It just says, we’ll ask for your consent and let you know that we’re doing some stuff with it.
That stuff could include creating an even more extensive advertising profile of you. Facebook makes money by knowing you as intimately as possible, so tapping into the online activity and preferences of your dating life are good for business by any stretch of the imagination.
In Cobb’s research, she found people were worried about how they came off to other people. But if the same applies to Facebook knowing things like your sex, sexual orientation, dating preferences and dating app preferences make you uneasy, it’s worth reevaluating how you login to your dating apps.
“In the work I did, people’s concerns were with what they shared with other people,” Cobb said. She said that they were worried about the way that they were portraying themselves through their online dating profiles, and whether that information would get back around to people they know in real life. While it might not be a top-of-mind anxiety, signing on with Facebook means that you’re also potentially sharing loads of information with a gargantuan, faceless corporation. One that’s, no offense, probably a lot more powerful than most people you know.
You might not also want to concern yourself with the seemingly endless abyss of third-party trackers splattered across the web consuming some of your most intimate data. If that makes you uneasy, might I suggest on your path to find love and/or get laid, you login with your email or phone number instead?
This post is part of our Privacy Not Included series. Check out the entire guide here.