Because there's a conflict of interest there - making money can, and often leads to business ending up harming the public to maintain/increase its profits.
Personally, I'm fine with businesses doing work for the good of the public. They should be transparent about it though.
In this case though the statement about "privacy" is seriously marred by the marketing of the product as "Hey, find out if your partner is cheating" rather than going "Hey, see how much we could find out from some vague details?"
Wait, Tinder has a public API? Damn it, whenever I have to teach students what a public API is, I use Tinder as an example of a service that does not provide an API and the resulting hoops a programmer has to jump through in order to programmatically use the service:
> But it doesn’t do so by hacking into Tinder, or even by “scraping” the app manually.
So it does scrapes everything manually. I am familiar with their non-public API, and there isn't any other way to find someone specific. You just have to swipe non-stop until you find them.
> But [the app] doesn’t do so by hacking into Tinder, or even by “scraping” the app manually. Instead, it searches the database using Tinder’s official API, which is intended for use by third-party developers who want to write software that plugs in with the site. All the information that it can reveal is considered public by the company, and revealed through the API with few safeguards.
Yes; that is the line that danso noticed. However, nemothekid tried to verify it and was unsuccessful in finding any documentation for this presumbably publically available API. A github gist is the top google result for 'Tinder API documentation'
Thanks for doing the Googling for me...should have assumed that the reported article and/or the people behind the app would be unreliable sources...any company of Tinder's size that puts the effort into making a public API would make relatively decent documentation that would show up in a cursory Google search result.
Also part of the lesson on "What is an API?": the concept that some companies do not have an incentive to make an API...and Tinder, for many good reasons, is one of those.
And worse, it is just regurgitating the Vanity Fair article, which has the same claim about a public API and is just as wrong. Great "journalism" there!
Doing so also breaks the actual app, though. In my experience, the private network API for a service with a client application is often more stable than the public one.
the cheating / jealousy market is a huge one. People with money that are insecure or suspicious may spend billions each year in private investigators, spy apps, etc. This page may be already making a killng, specially with all the free publicity from the medias that featured it
Of course, the expectation would not be "for any stranger at all to do systematic and statistical analysis". Similarly how most people don't mind stepping out of the house and being seen by strangers, yet reserving various notions of privacy.
No. You wanted to make money. Get off your high horse.