Tinder’s parent company Match Group has announced that Tinder has encrypted all the images that are transferred from its servers to its main application. The announcement was made via a letter addressed to US Senator Ron Wyden who had written to Tinder back in February requesting the company to encrypt photos.
In January, a security firm discovered that photos exchanged on Tinder weren’t encrypted. It was found that if the the firm connected to the same network pretending to be someone using the dating application, the pictures on the app could be easily intercepted between the firm’s and the app’s server. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to the company expressing concern over that how the images shared on Tinder are vulnerable and easily accessible. Tinder wrote back in a letter assuring him that all photos are encrypted, allowing users to upload their images securely.
“I am happy to report that ‘swipe data’ has been padded such that all actions are now the same size (effective June 19) and the images transmitted between the Tinder app and the servers are now fully encrypted as well (effective February 6; images on the web version of Tinder were already encrypted),” Jared Sane, General Counsel, Match Group, wrote in the letter.
Screengrab of the letter to Senator Wyden. (Credit: @matthew_d_green on Twitter)
According to the above letter sent to Sen, Tinder encrypted the photos on its app by February 4th, but waited to announce it until they’d fixed another issue. That is if a third party connected to the apps network it can discover the actions made on the app that are either left or right swipes by the amount of data that is transferred. This can give third party sources access to user behaviour on the app. The company waited to reply to Wyden until it had adjusted the swipe data to be of identical size, a fix implemented on June 19th.
This doesn’t change anything for the user except that they can be more assured that their photos are safe and only visible to other Tinder users.
