This Seems Like a Good Idea

So I just saw an article that mentioned this site, which is a matching website that matches you to potential romantic partners based on your browsing history.

Now in a vacuum, this is an interesting concept, as ones browsing history does tell a lot about you and I can imagine that someone with similar browsing history as yourself would have a higher chance of being compatible.

But at the same time, is this not just a perfect example of what so many on the internet rage against? Like, among all the fights for digital privacy and security, and the efforts to regulate tech companies’ usage of the personal data of individuals, and also the specific concerns of Google’s historical actions of using their browser to building advertising profiles for individuals based on their browsing history in Chrome, (which I think they have somewhat changed to be less individual specific, but still) this site immediately struck me as a perfect example of all these complaints.

Especially with how the vast majority of dating apps are guilty of exploitative practices based on the fact that their primary motivations are to keep you on their apps and paying for subscription tiers or being shown adds, with finding a partner secondary to that goal.

With that background context, seeing a site say “Hey! Upload your entire browsing history and we’ll find you a date!” immediately feels like a front for a personal data harvester. Now, to give the benefit of the doubt, they do have a privacy policy and European data laws specifically do impose restrictions nowadays. And they do say directly on their front page that they don’t share the data with anyone. But they do have it. They don’t say it’s anonymized. However, they also don’t have any subscription tiers and seem to have a “pay what you want up front” model. So I don’t think they are actually doing anything nefarious.

And really, this post isn’t making much of a point; I wrote it in like 10-15 minutes. It’s just funny to me seeing a page that on the tin is basically a combination of two of the most largely criticized online issues next to social media.

Dating Site + Harvesting of Browser History is not a good combination if your goal is to not look like you’re harvesting personal data for advertising profiles.