According to their website, every 14 minutes someone finds love on eHarmony. Every 14 minutes, people! This is curious because while you can sign up to eHarmony for free, you can't view pictures or do much more without paying for the premium features. And the shortest subscription you can get with eHarmony is for six months. Maybe someone finds love on eHarmony every 14 minutes, after spending six months looking? Launched in 2000, eHarmony has been around the online dating game for a while and today is targeted more towards serious matchmaking than casual hookups. They have really leaned into the use of artificial intelligence to help people find love, for better or worse. They even analyze your chats and online behavior to send suggestions to help you meet the 'right' people, at the 'right' time. Nothing creepy about that, right?
Que pourrait-il se passer en cas de problème ?
eHarmony seems to be one the better mainstream dating apps when it comes to privacy and security. Unfortunately, that's not saying a whole lot. They can still share your personal information for advertising purposes... and potentially with law enforcement. Blegh.
eHarmony is targeted at serious people seeking long-term relationships, and it's no small commitment to sign up. All new members have to take eHarmony's Compatibility Quiz, which is 80 questions long. It promises to give eHarmony a "near complete picture of who you are." Wow! The questions range from why you think you're single, to which abstract shapes you like best, to how you would react if you slipped on a banana peel (seriously!). Then you have to provide your occupation, income, ethnicity, education level, and religion before creating your profile which involves -- you guessed it -- answering more questions. eHarmony uses all that information to come up with Compatibility Scores between you and your matches. eHarmony doesn't really explain the number-crunching that goes on behind the scenes to come up with that score so we do have some concerns about whether it, like so many algorithms, could have harmful biases built in. Their Supplemental Privacy Policy does say race, ethnic origin, and religious beliefs can be used to calculate compatibility scores. What if you don't want to "dat[e] people just like you"? Well then eHarmony might not have the matching algorithm for you.
eHarmony says you can choose not to provide some pieces of sensitive personal information by choosing "prefer not to specify" from their list of possible answers. That's not as common as it should be in dating app land, so good on them. And it doesn't say so, but know that if you answer those questions that probably counts as consenting to eHarmony's processing of that information. Besides the information you share, eHarmony collects some information automatically, like how you use the app, when, and on which device. They can also collect your geolocation data and create inferences "reflecting [your] preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes" based on the rest of your personal information.
Add all that up and yeah, they know a great deal about you. And eHarmony says they can use personal information for reasons that won't help you "get who gets you," like for marketing, market research, and to "conduct data analysis." They can also share some with advertising networks and data analytics service providers. So like we said, they can use and share your personal information for ads. Oh, and we found a weird condition you should know about. eHarmony's privacy policy says they can share anything you've shared with them "if in our sole opinion, we suspect or have reason to suspect, that the information involves a party who may be the victim of abuse in any form," and that "[a]appropriate authorities may include, without limitation, law enforcement agencies, child protection agencies, or court officials." It's good to think of ways abuse victims can be protected, but that part about it being it being in "their sole opinion" stresses us out because it's not clear what it would take for your information to be shared. Yeeeesh. After that line, they pop in "[y]ou hereby acknowledge and agree that we are permitted to make such disclosure." Just saying "hereby" doesn't make it true, eHarmony!
We also have some lingering questions about eHarmony's use of artificial intelligence. We read that eHarmony uses AI to analyze users' conversations and give them advice on how to improve their communication skills. Besides our doubts about whether AI is a better conversatialist than you, we couldn't find any information about this how this feature works on eHarmony's website. We'd like to know what steps eHarmony's takes to keep the content of your conversations private.
Anywho! We promised you some good news and here it is. eHarmony has a pretty OK track record of keeping all that personal information they collect on their users safe. They haven't had any significant data breaches or hacks in the past three years. Weee. However we did notice that they got sued in 2023 for misleading users, which is not a good look. But! They also let all users, regardless of where they live, get their personal data deleted. We encourage you to take them up on that.
What could go wrong? Well, based on how their private policy is written, it seems possible that someone with bad intentions could accuse you of abusing them to eHarmony, and that eHarmony could "form the opinion" that that's true and then hand over all your private and sensitive information to the police or a child protection agency. It's downright spooky what users are "hereby" agreeing to with eHarmony.
Conseils pour vous protéger
- Follow eHarmony's safety tips.
- Visit the app's privacy preferences at the app and opt out from personalized advertising as well as all non-essential data collection.
- Request your data be deleted once you stop using the app. Simply deleting an app from your device usually does not erase your personal data nor does close your account.
- Do not give consent to constant geolocation tracking by the app. Better provide geolocation 'only when using the app'. - Do not share sensitive data through the app.
- Do not give access to your photos and video or camera.
- Do not log in using third-party accounts.
- Do not connect to any third party via the app, or at least make sure that a third party employs decent privacy practices.
- Do not give consent for sharing of personal data for marketing and advertisement.
- Choose a strong password! You may use a password control tool like 1Password, KeePass etc.
- Do not use social media plug-ins.
- Use your device privacy controls to limit access to your personal information via app (do not give access to your camera, microphone, images, location unless necessary).
- Keep your app regularly updated.
- Limit ad tracking via your device (eg on iPhone go to Privacy -> Advertising -> Limit ad tracking) and biggest ad networks (for Google, go to Google account and turn off ad personalization).
- When starting a sign-up, do not agree to tracking of your data if possible.
Ce produit peut-il m’espionner ?
Caméra
Appareil : Ne s’applique pas
Application : Oui
Microphone
Appareil : Ne s’applique pas
Application : Non
Piste la géolocalisation
Appareil : Ne s’applique pas
Application : Oui
Que peut-on utiliser pour s’inscrire ?
Adresse e-mail
Oui
Téléphone
Non
Compte tiers
Non
Quelles données l’entreprise collecte-t-elle ?
Personnelles
Name, email address, contact number, mailing address, date of birth, dating preferences, personality profile, credit and debit card information; religious beliefs, ethnicity and political views; IP address, browser type, Internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and number of clicks; mobile device ID, model and manufacturer, operating system, and version information;
Corporelles
Photo
Sociales
Comment l’entreprise utilise-t-elle les données ?
Comment pouvez-vous contrôler vos données ?
Quel est l’historique de l’entreprise en matière de protection des données des utilisateurs et utilisatrices ?
No known data breaches discovered in the last three years.
In September 2023, eHarmony was sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission over ‘free dating’ offer. The watchdog alleged the website tried to lure customers to sign up by falsely advertising “free dating”, one-month memberships and early cancellation options.
Informations liées à la vie privée des enfants
Ce produit peut-il être utilisé hors connexion ?
Informations relatives à la vie privée accessibles et compréhensibles ?
Liens vers les informations concernant la vie privée
Ce produit respecte-t-il nos critères élémentaires de sécurité ?
Chiffrement
Mot de passe robuste
Mises à jour de sécurité
Gestion des vulnérabilités
eHarmony runs a bug bounty program.
Politique de confidentialité
"eHarmony uses artificial intelligence to analyze user’s communication patterns and offer advice on enhancing their online conversation skills. The best part of the app is that it has an AI feature called Eharmony’s Premium Conversation Prompts that assists users in initiating meaningful conversations."
Cette IA est-elle non digne de confiance ?
Quel genre de décisions l’IA prend-elle à votre sujet ou pour vous ?
L’entreprise est-elle transparente sur le fonctionnement de l’IA ?
Les fonctionnalités de l’IA peuvent-elles être contrôlées par l’utilisateur ou l’utilisatrice ?
Pour aller plus loin
-
eharmony Review (2024): Is It Worth Using?Forbes Health
-
The best dating sites for finding serious long-term relationshipsMashable
-
‘Real love’ or false advertising? eHarmony sued by ACCC over ‘free dating’ offerThe Guardian
-
Best Dating Apps for 2024CNET
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