Monday, May 1, 2017

Tinder Shuts Down Access To Scraped Facial Data

Los Angeles-based Tinder has shut down access to a trove of facial images which had been scraped from the service using its API, after the data was uploaded to online data site Kaggle over the weekend. A data scientist apparently had scraped 40,000 faces from the dating service for use in developing artificial intelligence software. It appears that the data has now been removed from Kaggle. Tinder, in a statement on the data, said that the person who obtained the data had violated its terms of service, and it has taken appropriate action, saying it takes the security and privacy of its users seriously. The page that had been hosting that data now returns an error.