eHarmony

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.