Tinder Data Adventures: What Happens If You Ask Tinder About the Data They Store on You?
By: Dora Szucs
Tags: Online Dating, Tinder, Data Science, Privacy, Data Visualization

Tinder Data Adventures: What Happens If You Ask Tinder About the Data They Store on You? Dora Szucs Follow Dec 5 · 4 min read

Online-dating is still blooming in these days with millennials spending up to 10 hours a week on dating apps. While searching for their true love (or let’s be honest: their next hookup), they generate a huge amount of data by opening the app, uploading images, filling out bios, swiping on other users and chatting with their matches. As you suspect, this data does not disappear during the process but gets stored by Tinder instead.

Since released in September 2012, Tinder became one of the most successful dating apps (source).

As a registered user on Tinder, you have the right to know what data is gathered and stored about you - and Tinder shares this information with you on request. While most users haven’t heard of this feature, requesting the full history of your data from Tinder is fairly easy despite the small obstacles Tinder sets up in the process.

How do you request your data from Tinder?

Tinder’s help page gives you guidance in process of requesting your data and directs you to the web interface, where you can manage your account. The process is quite easy, you log in the same way you would normally do in the app (via phone number, Facebook or Google account) and input an email address where you want to receive your download link.

If you need some further help, you can use this step-by-step tutorial or watch the following tutorial video:

Receiving the data takes around 2–3 days and comes in a zip file containing a file of literally everything you’ve ever entered or done on in the app. You might be very excited now, but note that there is no way of getting your data immediately, so you must be a little patient before you can explore your Tinder history.

What does the file you receive from Tinder contain?

After receiving your download link and returning to Tinder’s website, you’ll end up downloading a zip file called (myData.zip), which contains

a folder with media files (images and videos) of your current profile

index.html, a poorly constructed HTML page that helps you read your raw data as is

data.json, the file that contains all your little Tinder secrets.

Data.json is the file in the center of our attention. It contains information that you entered on Tinder or allowed access to: your gender, name, sexual orientation, bio, city, IP address etc. (It does not contain your password, as apps and websites never store passwords as plain text!) It also marks the day of your registration and for each day since that special date, the file contains how many times you swiped per day into any direction, how many matches you had, how many times you opened the app etc. While your old matches often disappear (or unmatch you), this file holds these matches forever. The longest portion of your data is the part, where your chat messages appear. Note that Tinder only gives you your personal information and no information from other users, thus your matches are only identified by numbers and the data only contains your messages of every chat and none of the messages that other users sent you.

Ok, I got my data... But what do I do with it?

The file you receive might look intimidating at first glance, especially if you have no background in statistics or computer science and are not used to encountering large unreadable datasets. While the html-file (index.html) contained in the zipped data folder provides some help formatting the raw data, it does not provide any analysis on your dating behaviour.

Your raw data (data.json, left) compared to the formatted data (index.html, right) sent to you by Tinder on request.

To analyse your dating habits based on your historical data, find out how picky, attractive and active you are, you can use the data visualisation site called Tinder Insights. Tinder Insights takes care of the analysis of your data and generates beautiful infographics personalised to your gender and dating history. Besides summarising your data, Tinder Insights also tells you, which opening messages lead to your longest conversations, when are you the most active and how you compare to other Tinder users in terms of being picky and attractive.

A male user’s activity on Tinder since registration generated with Tinder Insights.

Before uploading your raw data on any less known data analysis platforms, take a second to review their privacy policy, as you might end up sharing sensible information about your dating life and sexual orientation with untrusted sources alongside with your personal data. Tinder Insights has a transparent privacy policy, which guarantees that all personal data is immediately deleted from your upload, thus no personal information, photo, chat message or similar data ever reaches Tinder Insights’ servers. Furthermore, by using Tinder Insights, you anonymously contribute to a database of behavioural data (swipe counts, match counts, app opens etc.) that will help future single people learn more about online dating.

How many of your right swipes end up being matches? Tinder Insights lets you compare your success on dating apps with other male and female users.

Still the deep dark secrets of online dating will further reside on Tinder’s (or the owner of nearly all existing dating apps, Match Group’s) hands. But the option to request your data and tools like Tinder Insights help us learn more about ourselves in the dating world and hopefully make us more conscious in the future while searching for love. Or whatever we are searching for.