Tinder wants you to give its AI access to all of your photos

One of the biggest pain points for users on dating apps is filling out a profile. Whether it’s because you don’t know what to add to your profile or you just don’t want to spend the time it takes. Tinder is working on a solution that could possibly make this task less of a chore. However, this new feature would come at the expense of your privacy.

According to 404 Media, Tinder is working on a feature that would allow an AI to scan your entire photo gallery. The feature is designed to help users build their profiles by offering insights based on themes and interests within their photos, like pets, activities, and food. Additionally, it would look for well-lit or well-framed photos to offer suggestions on what photos to upload to your profile. This feature is reportedly being tested and is coming to Australia sometime this month in early access.

While it may be convenient to have a tool put together a dating profile for you, this sounds like it could be a nightmare for privacy. If you were to use the feature, you would be giving it access to your full gallery. You won’t be able to pick which photos are scanned or ignored. So it won’t just be scanning your selfies, it will also be analyzing pictures of your family, sensitive documents, nudes, and so on. However, it appears that the tool would avoid scanning deleted photos and anything in your phone’s hidden folder.

In response to questions about privacy, Tinder Head of Product Mark Kantor told the outlet that the AI will attempt to filter out explicit images. Kantor adds that Tinder will not store the data the feature pulls from your photos on its end, “It’s purely on your device.” It’s reported that anything that doesn’t go on a public profile will be deleted. “It’s up to you to figure out what you’re comfortable sharing back with Tinder,” Kantor said.

In the future, it appears the company is planning to add the ability to turn your photos into larger collages for your profile. “We do give people a pretty big variety of photos so we’re not going to go from 30,000 to three,” Kantor stated. 404 Media reports that the feature will look for subject matter and try to group insights based on similar interests. “If I have one dog photo of 20,000, I’m not really a dog person,” Kantor explains.

Tinder appears to be keenly interested in the potential of AI. Reportedly, the company is using AI for more than half of the app’s code at this point. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of a company relying on AI for code generation. During a fourth-quarter earnings call, Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström claimed that the company’s best developers “have not written a single line of code since December” thanks to its internal AI coding system.