If you thought you could use Tinder and swipe with privacy, a new service called Swipebuster allows anyone with $5 and some vague personal info about you to find and view your profile. Now there’s an app that can bust your boyfriend or girlfriend if they’re using Tinder while in a loving, monogamous relationship with you. Swipebuster can even show the last date the target person used the dating app.
Advertisement
In the old days, a distraught spouse would have to hire some Philip Marlowe-type to track their husband or wife.
Previously if you wanted to spy on you lover, you’d have to make your own Tinder profile and swipe through thousands of profiles. Though the the service can be spotty-especially when searching for people in larger cities-it passed Vanity Fair’s unscientific test. In a dozen or so attempts last week Swipe Buster pulled up the specific Tinder users we searched for.
The man who created Swipe Buster – who goes unnamed in VF’s article – isn’t doing this to make money, you see.
A new online tool can search Tinder to find out if your partner has recently been swiping.
But Tinder differs from Swipebuster in that it doesn’t have a search function that allows you to find other users by their first name; you can only search for potential matches by gender, age or distance from your location.
Yet while suspicious spouses and the generally paranoid might shell out a fiver to confirm their worst suspicions, there are a few clearly troubling issues with the app – specifically, that it might not be used by suspicious spouses in the first place.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, the anonymous creator said: “There is too much data about people that people themselves don’t know is available”.
Tinder users now face the risk of zero privacy where anyone can access the dating site’s user profiles.
Advertisement
And making the database of Tinder users private wouldn’t stop people from going on Tinder to monitor people’s lives, either. If in response to Swipe Buster, Tinder “locks its information and closes its A.P.I.”, Swipe Buster will cease to exist.
