eHarmony

eHarmony

Passé en revue le : 15 mars 2024

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Mozilla a effectué 8 heures de recherches
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L’avis de Mozilla :

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Vote du public : Très flippant

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.

  • mobile

Ce produit peut-il m’espionner ? informations

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 ?

Quelles données l’entreprise collecte-t-elle ?

Comment l’entreprise utilise-t-elle les données ?

We ding this product as it shares personal data with third parties to allow them to deliver advertisement to you.

Privacy policy

"We use information that we collect about you or that you provide to us, including any personal information, to:

<...>

Communicate with you regarding promotions, including newsletters, new product offerings, special discounts and event notifications. Our communications may include advertisements and other third-party promotional materials, campaigns and tools.;

Conduct market and consumer research and trend analyses;

Enable posting on our blogs, forums, and other public communications;

Perform accounting, auditing, billing, reconciliation, and collection activities including collecting on outstanding and past due account balances;

Prevent, detect, identify, investigate, and respond to potential or actual claims, liabilities, prohibited behavior, and criminal activity;

Comply with and enforce legal requirements, agreements, and policies;

Achieve purposes for which we provide specific notice at the time of collection; and

For any other purpose with your consent."

"We may use third-party advertising agencies or other service providers to serve ads on our website on behalf of eharmony.

These companies may employ cookies or pixels to measure advertising effectiveness. Any information that these third parties collect via cookies and pixels is anonymous. Some of these third-party advertising agencies may be members of the Digital Advertising Alliance, which offers you the option to opt out of ad targeting from its member agencies by following the procedures <...>

We may also share your personal information (such as your IP address, device identifier or hashed email address) with third-party advertising companies to allow these companies to deliver relevant advertising to you.

We will only share your information with third parties in the ways defined in this Privacy Policy."

"We may also use advertising services provided by third-party platforms (such as social networking and other websites). For example, we may provide a hashed version of your email address or other information to help us find audiences that are likely to be interested in our Services."

"If you use a mobile device to access or download any of our Services, we may also collect device information (such as your mobile device ID, model and manufacturer), operating system, and version information. We use this information in the aggregate to analyze trends, administer our Services, prevent fraud, understand how users interact with our Services, and gather demographic information to tailor our visitors’ experience on our Services, show them content that we think they might be interested in, and display the content according to their preferences. We do not share this information with third parties."

Comment pouvez-vous contrôler vos données ?

Privacy policy

"All members may update or correct certain personal information directly in their account (e.g., email address, settings). Other personal information updates and corrections (e.g., date of birth) must be processed by our Customer Care team for verification purposes. In accordance with applicable law, we may not be able to update personal information if we are unsuccessful in verifying your identity or the accuracy of such information. To request a correction/update of any personal information that cannot be self-updated, please contact our Customer Care team at this link."

"If you are a Basic member (as defined in our Terms and Conditions) and have no unused virtual goods purchases reflected in your account, you can log into your account on our website, select Data & Settings, Profile Visibility and click “here” or click directly on this link to delete your profile and the data contained in your profile. Please note that this deletion on your own is only possible on our website and not in our apps. If you cannot log in on our Website, you need to submit a data deletion request using the link below.

If you are a Premium member (as defined in our Terms and Conditions) or a Basic member who has unused virtual goods purchases in your account, please submit a data deletion request using the link below."

"Any access, deletion or correction requests that can be processed by us will be done so within 45 days from the date we receive your request unless we notify you that an extension is required. In case of an extended completion period, we will process your request within 90 days from the date of your original request. If we are unable to satisfactorily verify your identity, we will not be able to process your request."

"We retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purpose(s) for which it was collected and to comply with applicable legal obligations and based on the criteria set out in this Privacy Policy."

"We will make good faith efforts to provide you with access to, correct, or delete your data when you request it, but there may be circumstances in which we may not provide access to, correct, or delete data as allowed by law. For example, we are not required to correct or delete personal information needed to provide a service you’ve asked us to provide, to detect fraudulent or illegal activity, for bookkeeping or tax purposes (e.g., transaction data), if your identity could not be verified, or data that is required for legal purposes. Also, we are not required to provide access to information that contains legal privilege, if your identity could not be verified, or where the information would compromise others’ privacy or other legitimate rights, like intellectual property rights. If we determine that your request for access, deletion, or correction should be denied or restricted for any reason , we will provide you with an explanation of why that determination has been made and a contact point for any further inquiries."

Quel est l’historique de l’entreprise en matière de protection des données des utilisateurs et utilisatrices ?

Moyen

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

"We only accept registrations to our Services from users who are 18 years or older (or the age of majority in applicable jurisdictions)If you believe that we may have collected any such personal information through our Services, please notify us as specified below and we will endeavor to delete that information from our systems in accordance with applicable law."

Ce produit peut-il être utilisé hors connexion ?

Non

Informations relatives à la vie privée accessibles et compréhensibles ?

Non

Liens vers les informations concernant la vie privée

Ce produit respecte-t-il nos critères élémentaires de sécurité ? informations

Oui

Chiffrement

Oui

Mot de passe robuste

Oui

Mises à jour de sécurité

Oui

Gestion des vulnérabilités

Oui

eHarmony runs a bug bounty program.

Politique de confidentialité

Oui

Le produit utilise-t-il une IA ? informations

Oui

"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 ?

Impossible à déterminer

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 ?

Impossible à déterminer

Les fonctionnalités de l’IA peuvent-elles être contrôlées par l’utilisateur ou l’utilisatrice ?

Impossible à déterminer

*Confidentialité non incluse

Pour aller plus loin

  • eharmony Review (2024): Is It Worth Using?
    Forbes Health Le lien s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet
  • The best dating sites for finding serious long-term relationships
    Mashable Le lien s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet
  • ‘Real love’ or false advertising? eHarmony sued by ACCC over ‘free dating’ offer
    The Guardian Le lien s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet
  • Best Dating Apps for 2024
    CNET Le lien s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet

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