whiteboardrOkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says
At this point, nearly every online service should be considered hostile. If they can make a small amount of money by compromising your privacy or your identity, they will. If they can make a small amount of money by stealing your attention and addicting you, they will.
Are there exceptions? I'm sure. Will I be erring sometimes by being cautious? Definitely. But, there is really not much of an alternative these days.
I have long wondered about the market size for privacy-focused apps. Sure, plenty of people don't know or don't care to value that, but if there are enough, maybe you could have a whole set of apps that emphasize they are not seeking world domination or selling out to the highest bidder, and a major selling point for using them would be that they are not < your expected chat/dating/photo/social site >.
Am I too idealistic? If such apps are not aggressively seeking hyper growth, it seems like these more trustworthy services could be deployed to cheap servers and let people use them for cheap without having to resort to selling user data.
The problem is that large-scale use of the Internet for social networks and for organizing meetings in real life is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. It works for small, tight-knit insular groups, but as soon as you expand the scope of the network to include acquaintances and friends of friends you'll eventually find a connection to someone who cares less about privacy than about making a buck.
If we had a sort of "federated" system we'd still have this problem because you might always find yourself federated with someone who just wants to sell the information.
It's a cultural problem within this hyper-aggressive version of Capitalism that we've adopted, that even data about people has value. Until we decide as a culture that this kind of data sale or data use is shameful and unacceptable we'll be in this situation no matter what technical solution we adopt.
> I have long wondered about the market size for privacy-focused apps.
The real problem is how to trust that a "privacy-focused" app is actually privacy-focused. You certainly can't take the publisher's word for it.
The only safe stance is to withhold as much personal information from as much software and services as possible.
Even if they were initially trustworthy, it's surely only a matter of time before they start wanting/needing to make (more) money and start abandoning their principles in pursuit of profit.
Or the company is sold to a big corp that doesn’t give a dammn about or privacy or one whose goal is to actually get the data.
If a company wanted to, they absolutely could include something along the lines of "If we violate the terms of this privacy policy, we owe all affected users $1000" in their Terms of Service. Pointing a gun at their own head to prove that they're serious. Companies don't do this, because they are cowards.
I’ve never posted information anywhere off a machine that I control unless I’m comfortable with it being sold or made public.
Reduces anxiety.
I guess I have no sympathy for the addicts, let the social media hyper capitalists consume your FOMO lives, I'll find value elsewhere.
It is sad to see how pathetic we are and yet have so much potential.
It is sad to see how pathetic we are and yet have so much potential.
I want to say "we structured the system like that, right?", i.e. maximize profit at all costs.
But it seems to be the natural outcome of the incentives, of an organization made of organisms in an entropy-based simulation.
i.e. the problem might be slightly deeper than an economic or political model. That being said, we might see something approximating post-scarcity economics in our lifetimes, which will be very interesting.
In the meantime... we might fiddle with the incentives a bit ;)
> we might see something approximating post-scarcity economics in our lifetimes
Can you elaborate more on this? All I see is growing inequality.
The upper arm of the K shaped economy uses their capital invent and control the replicator and the lower arm dies off? Seems like the most realistic path to "post-scarcity" from where we're standing now.
This sort of stuff continues to ramp up as everyone rushes to train LLMs while governments are pushing for ID verification that would make it impossible to use the web (or even one's own computer) anonymously. It's a very dark time for anyone who cares whatsoever about privacy or digital sovereignty.
Reminds me of another story when 23andme sold dna data https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5451398/23andme-sale-ap...
I remember warning everyone I knew that 23andme was about to go bankrupt and this would almost certainly mean all their data being sold to anyone they could.
I was dismissed. "The privacy policy doesn't allow it"
Peeps: privacy policies are not binding agreements, and even if they were, it always allows a corporation to sell your data.
Always.
No matter what it says today, because literally tomorrow they can change it to whatever they want.
I suspect that instead of them "giving" the photos to the facial recognition firm they sold them. Those photos and the PII data associated with them are the only things of value that a site like OKCupid controls.
The company was run by someone on the board of directors for ok cupid so it likely was just given
You are wrong, the article discusses this in detail.
> But even if they had no “commercial agreement,” Zeiler [Clarifai CEO] told the Times that his company gained access to user photos because some of OkCupid’s founders invested in Clarifai.
And
> In September 2014, the CEO of Clarifai, Inc. e-mailed one of OkCupid’s founders requesting that Humor Rainbow give Clarifai, Inc. (i.e., the Data Recipient) access to large datasets of OkCupid photos. Despite not having any business relationship with Humor Rainbow, the Data Recipient sought Humor Rainbow’s assistance because each of OkCupid’s founders, including Humor Rainbow’s President and Match Group, LLC’s CEO, were financially invested in the Data Recipient.
Lawyers: Besides whatever issue the company(ies) and investors might have with that behavior (self-dealing?), could it also let wronged individuals pierce the corporate veil, to go after personal assets?
Could this be the backstabbing surveillance capitalism incident that finally gives pause to tech executives?
Oh man… all across Chicago, lawyers are popping champagne right now. [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_...
