Does Tinder Reveal or Expose Your Email Address? 1

Does Tinder Reveal or Expose Your Email Address?

Today’s article is in response to another reader question and is about Tinder. They emailed us this week and asked, ‘Does Tinder show or disclose your email address? Ever since I signed up for the app, I’ve been receiving spam emails offering to set me up hot dates and I’m worried.’

Tinder is an outstanding dating app used by millions of people. It seems there are 1.9 billion scrolls per day. Lots of people are looking for dating! Since this is a dating app, you need to provide some personal data to create this profile. Tinder is connecting to Facebook, which means it has access to more data than you would like. This link between the two is the cost of doing business on Tinder.

Does Tinder Reveal or Expose Your Email Address? 2

Does Tinder show your email address?

Let me answer the first question first. Does Tinder show or disclose your email address? No Tinder will not tell anyone your phone number, real name, email address or anything else. That doesn’t mean this information isn’t leaked or hacked, but Tinder has a pretty strict data policy that keeps your personal information as safe as possible.

If you are interested in how much data Tinder holds on you, read this article from the British newspaper The Guardian.

Then how do spammers get my email address?

In the context of the original question, our dear reader said he started seeing spam emails shortly after signing up for Tinder. So how do spammers get their e-mail address?

Address lists

Dishonest ISP or company employees and hackers have been known to collect large lists of email addresses and sell them to spammers. You can buy lists of thousands of addresses on the darknet for as little as $40 per 100,000 addresses. If for some reason you give your email address to a company and an employee needs some money, this is one of the ways they can do it.

web scrapers

Web scrapers are bots that search the internet for email addresses. If you run a website or add your email address clearly on any web page, anywhere, it can be picked up by a scraper. These semi-intelligent programs look for ‘@’ anywhere on a page, filter out junk, and compile lists of multiple email addresses.

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shady companies

There are darker companies that offer you to sign up for newsletters, offers and other incentives, only to sell your personal data for cash. Many will promise you that your data will not be shared, but it is.

Social media

Social networks leak your data like a sieve. With online and social media the prime place for this to happen, it should come as no surprise that we all give in more data than we can. The same scrapers that work on web pages also target social networks.

dictionary bots

The last way someone can get your email address is to use a dictionary bot. The bot takes the usual @hotmail.com or @gmail.com addresses and just adds names, numbers and random words in front of the address prefix. Spam bots then send email messages to these randomly generated email addresses and note which ones are delivered and which are rejected by the email servers. Gradually, these addresses are refined until a legitimate address list is built.

So what was the point of this explanation of how spammers get your email addresses? Shows how email addresses can be found, accessed, and used. Just because you signed up for a new product or service recently and started receiving spam doesn’t necessarily mean the service has leaked your email address. There are many ways to get it.

Does Tinder Reveal or Expose Your Email Address? 3

How to use Tinder safely

Especially the usual method of using a Gmail address for your date doesn’t necessarily work for Tinder as it links directly to Facebook. It takes effort, but there is a way around it. Instead of just creating a specific email account, you’ll have to create a full contact just for Tinder.

This is only worth it if you plan to use Tinder a lot. Otherwise, you may prefer to spend the extra time filtering out junk mail. If you want to do that, here’s how.

  1. Create a new Gmail or Hotmail account with a fake name.
  2. Use your Google Voice phone number to sign up for Facebook or buy a $5 SIM. As far as I know, all the old ways of signing up without a phone number no longer work.
  3. Create a fake Facebook profile using as much truthful information as possible.
  4. Join Facebook groups, make friends Like some posts on your new Facebook account and interact as much as possible.
  5. After a month or so, when you have a sufficient level of activity on your Facebook account, sign up for Tinder using it.
  6. Start using Tinder as your new personality.
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I believe there is filtering on Tinder that looks for fake Facebook accounts to prevent scammers from creating fake Tinder profiles. So I suggest you leave it for a while until you have some time and activity under your belt. The more legitimate the account looks, the higher the chance of being accepted.

There is an obvious ethical question to be answered here. If you’re using a fake Facebook account, aren’t you scamming people you matched with on Tinder? The answer depends on how realistic you make your profile. If you tell the truth about everything but your email address, or use your middle name as your first name and tell the truth everywhere else, I see no problem with that.

The purpose here is to protect your personal data, not to defraud other Tinder users. As long as you’re honest about everything else, you should be fine. Any match you come across will understand as long as you don’t lie to them.

Tinder tries to protect your data as much as possible. If you read the article on how much data the company holds about you, creating a fake profile doesn’t seem like such a difficult task, does it?