Sometimes, the role of a person in tech is just telling people how they may be misusing their tech. A car manufacturer would get in trouble for releasing a car with a button to eject your passenger because it would be dangerous, but tech companies do not have such guardrails. You can nuke your privacy if you want to, you can irreparably damage your digital footprint with a tap. Today, we’re going to talk about one of those dangerous taps.
Tinder is rolling out a feature that would allow their AI to comb through your entire camera roll. That probably sounds scary, and it is. However, Tinder’s telling you about it. It’s part of a feature they’re launching. They want you to know about it and use it. However, every other company that requests access to your entire camera roll? You likely don’t know what they’re doing with that, and you can be sure they have access to the entire thing.
You should never allow a company to access your entire camera roll, and the reasoning is probably obvious.
Tinder’s AI Peeping
The best way I’ve met people is by doing things I like. Go to shows, head to the bar, play a sport, go to a fandom meet-up, whatever it is that brings you some joy, you can find a community around that interest. From there, you’ll find someone with similar interests who maybe is your type. It sounds complicated, but it’s not. The moment I gave up fear as a limiter and put myself out into my community, I found new friendships and relationships quickly.
Perhaps Tinder was inspired by how people actually meet partners and make lasting relationships in real life. Because what they want to do is comb through your life and try to build a profile of your interests to match you to similar people. The thing is, if your phone really has images matching your interests, couldn’t the events that lead to those photos have helped you meet people? Or, better yet, couldn’t they just ask you about your life and let you choose what answers to give or withhold?
I don’t think Tinder needs to capture your entire life just to figure out you’re a dog person.
Tinder says they’ll try to avoid scanning any risqué photos of yourself or others. However, your camera roll has much more than that. There’s photos of your documents, which you may have needed for employment or taxes. You could have pictures of friends and family, allowing Tinder or anyone else to run facial recognition on to figure out your entire network. Then there’s the metadata embedded in your photos. This includes location data and time and date, allowing whoever has access of your photos to know where you live, where you work, and map out where you like to go.
If you give Tinder access to your camera roll, you’re basically letting them know everything about your life.
Now, Tinder says this information is processed on-device. But I want you to understand a few key aspects of that. First, if you give them the ability to do something, like download all of your images, which this absolutely gives them the ability to do, then there’s no guarantee they won’t do it. Policy is not security. Policy can change and a “bug” could lead to that policy being broken with you having no recourse for compensation. Tinder has been exploited before to mine location data.
Secondly, even if they don’t collect all of the information from your photos, they’re still having you upload information about who knows what to match you with someone else. They certainly will collect interests, but perhaps also location data, information about who is in your group. God knows what they may collect.
This reminds me of how Meta claims WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted and secure, but they don’t say that they collect metadata on your conversations, that local processing before that encryption could be used on messages to collect information on topics you discuss or other advertising metrics, and that reporting someone will decrypt your messages. A software company can tell you what you want to hear, like that your photos stay on your device, without revealing that the real data they can collect from those photos is more valuable anyway.
Is Tinder doing any of that? We don’t know. And even if they aren’t now, that’s no guarantee they won’t in the future. That’s why you can’t let them access your entire camera roll.
Tinder claims their software is written by AI more often than humans now. AI can’t be fired. AI can’t be liable. AI doesn’t know what you may consider private or what line of code could cause an app to break its privacy policy. Trust no one who relies on AI, especially when they’re asking for the key to your house and have violated your privacy in the past already.
Meta, Discord, Everyone’s Doing This, It’s All Bad
I don’t mean to pick on Tinder here. Tinder is far from the only company that asks for access to your entire camera roll. Just about every app that allows you to upload images will try to get access to the full roll. From a user perspective, this is easier than having you select the images that you want to share with the app every time. However, from a privacy perspective, it’s just two extra taps to upload a photo if you set it to only allow apps access to the images you select.
That’s how I continue to use apps like Instagram on my phone. Yes, Instagram is a privacy thief. But by limiting their access to images I select and upload only, I can screen images for private details and strip them of any metadata before I upload them. And, seriously, it takes two additional taps. One to “Select More Photos” and one to select the photo I want to upload. That’s it. Then I tap that photo and I can upload it. Those two extra taps, less than 5 seconds of work, lead to my entire camera roll being locked away from Instagram or whatever app I’m using. It protects my privacy from mistakes or intentional scraping of my data.
No app. Not a single one, should have full camera roll access. On Android ad iOS, you can choose to allow access to selected photos only or “limited access.” This is the only way you should allow any app to access your camera roll. Here’s how you can go through your privacy settings to ensure that you turn off full access for apps that may have gotten it before.
On iOS:
- Open Settings
- Open Privacy and Security
- Scroll down to Photos and tap it if you see any have full access
- Scroll through the list of apps with access to your photos and ensure none have full access. Limit access for all of them.
- While you’re here, take a look at apps that have access to your contacts, calendars, and location data. Once more, none should have full access or always-on access.
On Android:
This is more complicated and frustrating, because of course it is. Google is one of the worst violators of privacy and Android is heavily developed by them. It may also be different depending on what version of Android you’re using or what manufacturer your phone is from. But this may give you a general idea of where to look.
- Open Settings
- Go to Security & Privacy
- Scroll to Privacy Dashboard
- Tap See Other Permissions
- Tap Photos and videos
- Tap into every app under the “Allowed” category. Android doesn’t split out the apps that have full access from those with limited access, so you’ll have to check every app that has access to your camera roll yourself
- Go in to each app and make sure that it does not say “Always allow all” for any apps. Instead, select “Allow limited access” or “Don’t allow,” if you don’t want to upload images to that app anyway
- For some apps, I found this moved them into the “Ask every time” category, but I also found apps that already had limited access in the “Allowed” section, so just check everything.
- Once you’re done, go back to the Privacy Dashboard. You’ll want to go through your SMS, Phone, nearby devices, contacts, call logs, calendar, and of course, location. You can also find access to these in the Apps section, if you’re willing to go through apps individually.
- You should also consider not using Google Photos. Google does upload all your images to their servers, and does train AI. You can choose an app like Aves Gallery, which doesn’t upload your images
Think about what permissions you may have granted to apps you use, and limit them. Android, unless you’re using a de-Googled version of Android with a focus on privacy, is an incredibly open operating system. You’ll be sharing data with app developers and especially Google if you’re not more careful. iOS will give you more control over your privacy and make it easier to access, and Apple doesn’t want to collect your data anyway, but the same dangers exist on any platform. Our phones hold so much of our lives, and make it so easy to share those aspects of our lives with others. Don’t make the mistake of compromising your privacy with these apps, you can never really get it back, only limit what you lose in the future.
You shouldn’t compromise your privacy for any apps trying to get your full camera roll access. No feature is worth it.