Why dating apps know more about you than other apps
A dating app holds a combination of things almost no other app has: what you look like, where you spend your time, who you are looking for and what you type at one in the morning. Just choosing whether you want to meet men or women reveals your sexual orientation. Add religion, whether you want children or how you live, and you have a very personal file. European data protection law treats several of these traits as special categories that deserve extra protection.
That is why privacy is not a side issue in our test. It counts exactly as much as reach or price. We look at the providers’ public privacy information, the settings inside the app and how much control you keep. What a company does with the data internally cannot be checked from the outside, so we do not guess.
This guide walks through the four big data sources: location, photos, contacts and the advertising ID. For each one you will find what you can limit yourself. At the end come the privacy scores of the six apps in our matrix and what they mean in practice.
Location: the most sensitive data point
Hardly any dating app works without your location, because it has to know who is nearby. So the question is not whether, but how precisely and how often. Location that is checked only while the app is open is a different thing from location tracked in the background. And a distance accurate to the metre is a different thing from ‘about three miles away’.
On an iPhone you can allow location only while using the app and turn off precise location for each app. Recent versions of Android offer the same choice between precise and approximate location. Try whether your app works with approximate location. If it suddenly throws errors, that tells you something about its priorities.
One point people often miss: if you always open the app at home, the distance shown on your profile gives strangers a rough idea of where you live. Open it at work or in a café too. If an app lets you set a place by hand, choose the neighbourhood, not your street.
Photos: what a picture gives away
Your profile photos are visible to everyone using the app in your area, which means a lot of strangers. A picture you also use on LinkedIn or Instagram can be matched to your full name within seconds through a reverse image search. If you want to stay anonymous until you know someone, use photos that exist only on the dating app.
Check the background: house numbers, street signs, a work badge, the sign of the gym around the corner. One detail on its own is harmless, three together add up to an address. Then there is the location data many phones quietly write into every photo. You cannot see from the outside whether an app strips it on upload, so remove it yourself first; on an iPhone you can do this under Options when you share a picture.
Photo verification adds a selfie that is compared with your profile pictures. It protects everyone from fake profiles, but it is also an image that can be analysed biometrically. Check the privacy information for how long it is kept. If it says nothing, count that as a minus point, not as a reason to skip verification.
Contacts, social login and linked accounts
Some apps offer to scan your address book so that colleagues or an ex never see your profile. The idea is good, the cost is high: the app reads the numbers of everyone in your phone, and none of them agreed to that. If you only want to avoid two or three people, ask yourself whether that is worth handing over your whole address book.
Signing in with an existing account works the same way. Logging in with Facebook or Google is convenient, but it ties together two pools of data you may prefer to keep apart. Signing up with an email address or phone number takes two extra minutes and keeps things separate. If you use Sign in with Apple, you can also hide your real email address.
Linking Instagram or a music service makes a profile feel more alive. It also shows your username or your habits to people you have not exchanged a single word with. When in doubt, a linked account is the quickest route from your first name to your full name.
Advertising ID and tracking: the invisible profile
Every smartphone has an advertising ID, a number that lets ad networks recognise you across different apps. Many free apps make part of their money from advertising and ask for this number. Few people like the idea of it being read inside a dating app once they think about it.
Switching it off is quick. On an iPhone, go to Privacy and Security, then Tracking, and turn off ‘Allow Apps to Request to Track’; every new request is then declined automatically. On Android you can delete the advertising ID in Settings under Privacy and Ads. Neither costs you a single feature of the dating app.
What this does not switch off is the data you give the app yourself. The advertising ID is about the route to third parties, not about what the provider knows. So the two belong together: tracking off, and nothing on your profile you would not tell a stranger on the train.
What you can limit in any app
Before you fill in a profile, open the app’s own privacy settings. Some apps let you hide your age or distance, often only with a subscription; nearly all of them let you pause your profile. These switches tend to sit deep in the menus and start out on the open side. Ten minutes at the beginning save you some awkward surprises later.
For profile fields, keep one rule: give what the search needs, everything else is optional. Religion, politics or health are never required, however politely the app asks. Where an app lets people filter by religion, as embla does with embla+, the answer becomes a real search criterion. Only add it if it genuinely helps your search.
Finally, uninstalling is not deleting. Removing the app from your phone leaves your account, photos and chats with the provider. Delete the account in the settings before you remove the app. Under European law you can also ask at any time which data is stored about you.
The six apps by privacy score
No app in our matrix gets full marks for privacy. That is not an accident: there is no such thing as a dating app without location, photos and personal details, and where that much sensitive data sits, a 5 is a high bar. The range runs from 2 to 4 out of 5. The scores rest on public information and the available settings, not on guesses about data flows behind the scenes.
Tinder and Badoo come out weakest with 2 out of 5 each. Both are broad products with many extra features and links to other services, and they give you the least overview of which detail is used for what. Bumble, Hinge and Dua sit in the solid middle with 3 out of 5 each: the usual requests, understandable settings, nothing beyond the industry standard.
embla has the best score at a provisional 4 out of 5. The reason lies in the concept: there is no swiping, contact only happens through a specific sentence or a specific photo, and there is no boost or spotlight. Fewer features mean fewer routes along which data is needed. Since embla is not yet in the App Store, we are rating the concept and the model here, not everyday use, and the score will be checked again after launch.
Verdict: privacy is a setting, not a feature
The scores show where you start, not where you end up. An app scoring 2 out of 5 with carefully chosen settings protects you better than one scoring 4 where you have allowed everything. The biggest variable is you: which photos, which location, which linked accounts.
Our order for the first ten minutes: location only while using the app and approximate, tracking off, email sign-up instead of social login, no Instagram link, photos without location data and without twins elsewhere online. Then go through every setting of the app once. If privacy matters most, embla, Bumble, Hinge and Dua give you the better starting point; if you stay on Tinder or Badoo for the reach, set things up all the more carefully.