Hacker Steve Lord spoke to What Mobile about the dark side of Tinder and things got a little weird.
Tinder can be a pretty dark place and aside from getting a joust every hundred matches or so, it’s a pretty vile and scary world for the average, reasonably attractive female. Certain… graphic images seem to be very popular in the world of Tinder and get sent to women everywhere on a daily basis. We’re of course talking about the male penis. Sending pictures of your purple headed yogurt slinger is colloquially known as the ‘dick pic.’ A 14-year-old boy was charged with the crime of making and distributing indecent images, after sending nudes via Snapchat to a school mate. It’s a crime yet a lot of men still do it.
Tinder used to allow Snapchat-esque photo sharing with a feature called ‘Moments,’ which obviously was abused with ‘dick pics.’ Tinder removed ‘Moments’ last year unsurprisingly and did not comment on why. But we all know why.
Tinder is a funny game, I say game as dating is in essence a game requiring you to press the right buttons to achieve success. Although it’s a punishing game with no save points for when you royally mess up, no File > Load here, nor starting all over again (well, not with the same person at least).
What Mobile invited expert White Hat hacker Steve Lord, to join us for our weekly podcast and spoke to us about horrible dates, building bots for more matches and the ‘dark side’ of Tinder.
Steve is a well travelled man due to his career in the security sector. Two years ago as a single man he found it hard to find someone special while globetrotting. So he did what any genius hacker would do and built bots to swipe right for him. Bots are software applications that carry out automated tasks. Guys on Tinder will be very familiar with them, since 90% of said females using the app are just fake profiles designed to tease your member.
“Because I was travelling a lot I created bots, [and] I worked out where I was going to be in two weeks and set the bots up to say I was in X location, and swipe right. I was flitting a lot between London and Berlin, so I would then get the bots working with no boundaries, and got some really weird stuff back.”
Naturally, one cannot discuss Tinder without asking about strange dates. Because they’re usually insightful but most of all funny. Steve told us about one of the weirdest dates we’ve ever heard.
“The weirdest date I’ve ever had was with this lady who was… different. For our first and only date we went to a lecture on people who claim to receive phone calls from the dead.
“She wasn’t a goth, relatively normal, she was just really into death and she had a weird sort of smell I couldn’t put my finger on. I just thought she had really poor taste in perfume. We went back to hers afterwards and that smell turned out to be jars of embalming fluid.”
Needless to say Steve got the hell out of Dodge. Please stay with us, the technology part of the article is coming.
“If you’re into playing around with systems and services, you can do all kinds of crazy things with online dating services and reach people that are many… many degrees removed from what you call normal.”
Steve did another experiment with Tinder, this time to up his dating game. He wanted to how interaction was for women and what could he learn from it. Steve created fake female profiles and discovered these profiles were being sent a lot of… unsavoury images.
“I ran a computer vision algorithm over a selection of these pictures to see if it could distinguish between pictures it hadn’t seen before. It would categorise which pictures were the same and which were different. It turns out people who post horrible dick pics are copying them from another website so it’s not actually theirs!
“There’s a service called Tin Eye where you submit a picture and it will tell you its source. The sources varied. Porn sites yes.
“It did not matter what you set as your profile, one of my profiles was set at 85 years old with a picture of an avocado, and that got dick pics.”
Speaking to The Metro, behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings said men who send crude images are using it as a “mating device.”
“In their naiveté, they’d obviously like to see a picture of you naked, so why wouldn’t you want to see the same?
“And it might prompt you to send one back. Unlikely, but there’s always that possibility lurking in their Neanderthal minds. But it also cuts to the chase without having to explain in any words that they’re after sex rather than a relationship.”
Before leaving us Steve had some advice to share if you’re still on Tinder and fancy taking a leaf out of his book.
“If you ever decide to build a bot for Tinder matches, make sure you screen what comes back to you. Oh and If I was a woman I would not use Tinder.”
For more features visit What Mobile’s dedicated features page.
