‘Privacy Risks in Mobile Dating Apps’

This article explores an in-depth analysis into the social media trend of dating apps and the privacy risks uses can encounter when participating with these platforms. The article suggests Proximity-based GSNs or ‘proximity systems’ and other GeoSocial apps that broadcast a user’s location can lead to potential invasions of privacy. The researches also explore the analysed use of Facebook login credentials as an authentication provider in which many applications can access to a user’s profile information including that which may be switched onto private. The article is useful to the research within our topic as it provides an in depth insight into the use of applications within wearable smartphone devices and the influx of these devices in modern society. It also examines the statistics within the number of users using the apps as well as which application use different proximity systems. The article is beneficial to our topic since it touches on an issue inherent to the subject of wearable devices.

The findings relate to how privacy on mobile dating apps is quite limited almost stating in half of the apps the article presents the researchers were able to recover messages sent or received by a user. The article also notes almost all of the applications mentioned leaked profile images to some extent. The overall summary being that in using GeoSocial dating apps, much of the data can be easily recovered even once deleted. This article had a personal interest to me as well having used many apps that involved GeoSocial retrieval of information. It makes me question which ones I would allow to have access and which could potentially be unsafe.
Farnden, J, Martini, B, Choo, K-K R, 2015. ‘Privacy Risks in Mobile Dating Apps’, University of South Australia, Association for Information Systems, pp. 13-15