$5, same as in town

April 4, 2016 4:55 PM

"Swipe Buster, he said, was an attempt, albeit perhaps a prurient and sordid one, to use a popular company (Tinder) and a juicy lure (cheating) in order to educate people about how much of their personal data is out there and how easily people can get access to it without hacking or breaking rules. (Swipe Buster was originally called Tinder Buster. It changed its name and URL on Sunday evening.)" — Here’s How You Can Check if Your Partner Is Cheating on Tinder by Emily Jane Fox for Vanity Fair. Previously: Tinder Confidential, and relatedly: Ashley Madison has been hacked.

"A Tinder spokeswoman said in a statement that 'searchable information on the Web site is public information that Tinder users have on their profiles. If you want to see who’s on Tinder we recommend saving your money and downloading the app for free.' That, of course, would not provide the instant gratification and easy answers that many people would shell out $5 for faster than they could swipe right. The spokeswoman did not indicate whether Tinder would close its A.P.I."

via Angela Lashbrook (@lemonsand)

posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (8 comments total)

The article claims that Tinder's API is public, but I'm not sure it is. Tinder's private API has certainly been reverse-engineered by various people though! So probably this is just logging in to Tinder and swiping right on everyone in a particular geographical location until it sees the name it's looking for.

The article seems to imply that Tinder could "just" close its API, but that's not really true. They could perform rate-limiting and attempt to more aggressively verify whether it's being queried by the Actual Tinder App rather than a bot, but it's not a game it's possible to win forever.
posted by BungaDunga at 5:42 PM on April 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

If you ever find yourself budgeting for tracking your spouse, save your money and hire a divorce lawyer, because it's over.

- sage advice I've heard over the years
posted by sidereal at 6:25 PM on April 4, 2016 [10 favorites]

yeah but what if it's the end of the fiscal year and your spouse-tracking budget is use-it-or-lose-it?
posted by indubitable at 8:20 PM on April 4, 2016 [36 favorites]

The 'Senior Citizens use Tinder for the first time' video at the bottom is worth a watch and results in a pleasant discussion between some lovely people.
posted by sektah at 4:38 AM on April 5, 2016

Golly, I just use The Find My iPhone app to track husband's whereabouts. Tracking the device and seeing patterns is more interesting.
posted by jadepearl at 5:26 AM on April 5, 2016

Ah, excellent. Another tool for a crazy ex to use against their former SO's. /sarcasm
posted by Catbunny at 5:52 AM on April 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Any decent book of marriage advice will tell you that you and your spouse should budget and agree ahead of time whether or not unspent spouse-tracking funds will roll over at the end of the month.
posted by straight at 6:41 AM on April 5, 2016 [9 favorites]

For the record, here's the senior citizens use tinder video.

I also got a kick out of this one, showing Lulu to seniors.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 12:34 AM on April 6, 2016