OKCupid

OKCupid joined the likes of Tinder, Bumble, Grindr, and Coffee Meets Bagel in that crowded gang in 2020 when researchers found a number of security flaws in OKCupid that could let attackers steal users' personal information, view their private messages, and hijack a user's account and pretend to be them. OKCupid has also been called out in a recent Norwegian Consumer Council study that found OKCupid may be sharing users' personal information like location, sexual preferences, and behavioral data with third parties and other Match Group brands in ways that may violate privacy laws. Finally, Match Group owns OKCupid and at least 45 other dating sites like Hinge, Tinder, and Plenty of Fish. When you sign up with one of these dating sites, the Match Group privacy policy states they may share your personal information with any of the other Match Groups sites for what they say are non-commercial limited and critical purposes. That's a lot of personal data you might have thought only going to once place getting shared across multiple dating sites. Without a lot of transparency into the algorithm, one concern when apps collect this information is it's hard to know how you might be matched and whether the apps have any potential bias. Security flaws, poor privacy practices, sharing data with who knows who, lack of transparency in their algorithms -- OKCupid maybe isn't the worst dating app for protecting users' privacy we've seen (looking at you Grindr), but it’s not great.