88% of dating apps fail Mozilla's privacy review. 80% may share or sell your personal information for advertising, while charging you a subscription on top. As Mozilla's Privacy Not Included team puts it: "With dating apps, it's not your money or your privacy. It's often both."
Looking for love shouldn't cost you your private life. Here's what dating apps really do with your data, and how to opt out.
What dating apps collect about you
More than you think. Comparitech analyzed 102 dating apps and found the average app ships with 8.7 embedded trackers. One had 28. Twenty-eight. Google Firebase Analytics sits in 91% of them, Meta's pixel in a quarter, Google's AdMob in half. All but two contained trackers.
Then come the permissions. The average dating app requests just over 30 Android permissions, about 8 of them "dangerous": your camera, microphone, precise location, your files. Some ask for more than 50.
And your location isn't as safe as you'd hope. In 2024, researchers at KU Leuven tested the 15 most-downloaded location-based dating apps. All 15 leaked personal and sensitive data (gender, sexual orientation) in their internet traffic. Six leaked near-exact user locations. Their advice is blunt: "Everything you share with a dating app is saved to their servers and can, knowingly or unknowingly, be shared with others, now or in the future."
Where your data actually goes
Your profile doesn't stay on the app. The Norwegian Consumer Council's Out of Control report found that 10 popular apps sent user data to at least 135 different third parties involved in behavioral profiling, often with no viable opt-out. Grindr users' advertising IDs and IP addresses were relayed to ad-tech chains that "reserved the rights to share information onward with potentially thousands of further companies." Norway's privacy board confirmed a €5.8 million fine over it.
And when data leaks, it leaks badly. According to Incogni's research, roughly 70,000 photos of 16,000 Tinder users ended up on a cybercrime forum. Bumble left an unsecured database exposing users' physical traits, location and education for at least seven months. Mozilla found that 52% of the apps it reviewed had suffered a breach, leak or hack in the past three years.
How to protect yourself: a checklist
You can't fix the industry overnight, but you can shrink your footprint today:
- Check "Data safety" before downloading. On Google Play, open the app's page and read what it collects and shares. 24% of dating apps don't even meet Google's policy standards.
- Lock down permissions. Revoke camera roll, contacts, microphone and precise location. Prefer approximate location, granted per session.
- Never sign in with Facebook or Google. Social login pipes your profile into more trackers; Facebook Login sits in 53% of dating apps.
- Treat your dating profile like a public page. Skip employer, political views and religion. Apps ask up to 23 profile fields, and up to half are sensitive.
- Skip biometric "verification" when it's optional. Passports and face data become breach targets.
- Delete your account, not just the app. Exercise your access and erasure rights: 11 of 102 apps don't even explain how deletion works, so follow up in writing.
- Limit ad tracking at the OS level. Reset your Advertising ID on Android, or turn off "Allow Apps to Request to Track" on iOS.
- Or skip the whole problem and pick an app that doesn't want your data in the first place: end-to-end encryption, ephemeral messages, no ad SDKs.
Or use an app that never wanted your data
Texto was built the opposite way. No ads means no ad trackers: zero third-party advertising or analytics SDKs watching who you talk to. Messages are end-to-end encrypted and ephemeral. When a conversation ends, it's gone, without leaving digital traces. We keep no archive to mine, sell or lose in a breach. You can't leak a database that doesn't exist.
And it's free. Not "free with a premium tier". Free. No subscription, no boosts, no paying to be seen, because we don't need your money or your data.
Your love life is your business. Keep it that way.