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IPFS News Link • Social Networking/Social Media

Tinder Somehow Found a Way to Be Even Creepier

• http://gizmodo.com, Sophie Kleeman

Tinder announced Smart Photos in a blog post this morning. In essence, it's a toggle-on, toggle-off algorithm that switches up the photos on your profile to put the most popular ones first. It "continuously tests your profile photos for their success," which theoretically means that right swipe-worthy photos will come up more often.

But it also considers a user's "individual swiping pattern"—basically the sad, 21st century equivalent of a fingerprint—so if your profile pops up for someone who always swipes left on people wearing hats, that sweet photo of you in your beanie probably won't come up first for them.

If this sounds like a bizarro Philip K. Dickian universe in which users are subjected to A/B testing, well, it basically is. (The developers behind the algorithm even bring it up in a blog post.) The idea of automatically selecting your "best" photos on a dating app isn't an inherently terrible idea—thumbs up for anything that helps get us all laid—but the idea of tracking someone's "individual swiping pattern" is creepy as hell.


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