Tinder has a secret success rate value for your photos

http://uk.businessinsider.com/tinder-secret-success-rate-photos-right-swipe-percentage-2017-3?r=US&IR=T

by mendez • 9 years ago

16 8 9 years ago

uk.businessinsider.com

mendez2• 9 years ago

A London startup, Rentify, were trying to replace every photo returned by the Tinder API over their network with their CEO's face when they discovered a secret value showing the success rate of a user's photo. Full marks for fun office hack originality. 0 marks for Tinder for not using https for their photos.

A friend of mine also discovered Tinder was returning dates of birth to calculate age client side, so was able to predict other user's star signs: https://medium.com/haralds-notebook/tinder-should-probably-f... It proved fairly effective at getting a reply, as you might imagine. Thankfully he had the decency to explain how he guessed.

georgespencer3• 9 years ago

This was us! Thanks for linking.

The terrifying bit is the sheer volume of data Tinder is leaking -- I would assume accidentally. The swipe % on the images for referrer and referee are pretty bad, but DOB and number of FB friends is enough data that you could trivially locate the person on Facebook.

mendez2• 9 years ago

Nice work! Agree, basic stuff as well - calculating an age from DateTime on the server is coding 101.

nrki• 9 years ago

This is creepy. Your boss MITMing your internet at work and replacing photos.

What else is he doing to your traffic?

Insert retorts about "but it's their wifi" below. It's still scummy. Provide unmodified wifi or don't provide internet on the wifi.

georgespencer3• 9 years ago

What else is he doing to your traffic?

Replacing asinine Hacker News comments with meaningful ones.

wintermute-_-• 9 years ago

Not a secret. There's a feature called Smart Photos that you can toggle on and off which basically A/B tests your photos and displays the best performing one first.

patbutcher• 9 years ago

The key difference is that feature simply places your best performing photo first. The relevance of it leaking an actual number which represents the ratio of right to left swipes is the critical part.

It offers a comparison with other users and the average across all of a users photos probably correlates strongly with the mysterious 'Tinder rating ™'

georgespencer3• 9 years ago

And the fact that it's leaking other user's and not just yours (in fact, in order to get your own you'd need to have two Tinder accounts).

Tinder has a secret success rate value for your photos

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