>, I would regulate the information dating apps collect to the same standards as patients' national healthcare information is handled(in the EU; I don't know about the US/UK but I heard it's not all rozy there).

In the case of Grindr they released user HIV status information which is literally medical data.

>Personally, I have no dog in this fight since I gave up on online dating and got good at IRL dating(pre-COVID) but I am aware of plenty of men willing to throw their cash and intimate data at these corporations for the hope of meeting someone.

Good for you, it's a giant scam( See FTC Sues Match). I also gave up on these apps and started meeting amazing people in real life. It's also much less stressful to disconnect from the social media matrix.

I put vastly less effort into meeting people now and I found myself actually getting approached last year. I've found greater peace. Social Media is a very bad thing for most people. You waste tons of time you could be spending on other things. Doesn't help people tend to be much meaner online. Again , why deal with that.

With Corona I've been trying to focus more on learning music , but I'm fairly optimistic next year things will be somewhat normal.

Wait until Tinder bans your "account" which is basically a broad fingerprint of your physical device, Google/Apple account (from the play/app store), phone number, and WiFi details. Then you can turn paranoid.

How long until the one drink I had too many at a bar whilst dating turns into a statistically higher insurance premium. Or my church finds out about my in-progress divorce and excommunicates me.

The ability for the individual to reveal specific information on their own terms is necessary for social cohesion.

Let's not pretend we have transparency on what our information is being used for, nor are we likely to ever get it. The devil's in the details.

Why belong to a church and hide major life events like divorces from it?

But your broader point is sound. I'd just replace "church" with "nosy extended relative".

Getting excommunicated whilst going through a messy divorce with kids is a problem. It could benefit from waiting until the divorce is concluded, particularly for the sake of the kids' stability. Those events can have repercussions for a long time if antagonised.

You could pick any situation where a process like divorce is started, proceedings or repair of the relationship has yet to begin and an automated service alerts people without immediate knowledge, who in turn pull the levers behind the scenes.

Also the King Henry the 8th parallels are interesting.

Folks have a bleakly transactional or institutional approach to church that I find baffling. I'm not sure what the point of church is if it doesn't help through personal crises.

Beyond that, if the divorce is OK with the church, what's the secret? If it's not OK and it's still happening, doesn't that imply irreconcilable differences with the church as well as the spouse? I guess given that, you have a point about timing, but all relationships are two-way streets, including ones between families and churches. Seems like the problems unravel on their own and we're just complaining about a catalyst.

Well I try to stick to simple and universal, pragmatic problems. The timing thing is easy to see both sides as relatively neutral parties, without deliberate malice and still producing negative effects of consequence.

You could apply the same to being one day late on your taxes or truancy at school triggering automatic effects from phone location tracking, without reconcilliation.

If you want more serious examples there is the problem of what knowledge is deemed to be acceptable by those who record it and the potential for power, control and abusive influence.

Silent judgement and action is infinitely more available to the men and women behind the information gates. Without transperancy you'll never know why the things in your life are happening the way they are.

You might piss off the wrong IT guy at Facebook who then plasters your families' individual accounts with ads and content promoting the necessity of moving out and separating from a parent who has brown hair and other fake 'crimes' you committed. He could manufacture consesus in their social media with fake accounts. Your boss may be influenced to devalue the contributions of your kind of knowledge work because he buys into a work trend that was hyper-advertised to him. Your car may quietly auto-update with a bugged software patch that bricks it. You could have your credit score ruined by fake transactions and have your passport put into question.

There is a lot of power in knowledge these days and we fly by the seat of our pants because we want it to be on our side whatever the cost. I don't think any of this is particularly paranoid when mainstream hollywood movies have chronicled snowden/assange/security researcher leaks.

People are getting hacked every day, experian couldnt save their data from getting leaked, who's to say anyone is safe. Certainly not the head of the nsa or security reseachers who have been doing this for decades.

I'm very on board with privacy and discretion. I was just puzzled by specifically hiding divorce from a church.

Healthy churches actually benefit from privacy and discretion for the same reasons therapy groups do. Often church activities are literally private therapy sessions.

Some years ago Polish people living and working in Germany declared apostasis to avoid German church tax. They were suprised after returning back when their parish in Poland refused child baptism or church burial..

It's hard to believe they can do this, but can't even reign in copy & paste profile spammers.

Has this happened to you? What was it for? What did you do?

After many matches and chats one will be disliked by many, some will react disproportionately. It happened though without a single physical encounter which they can easily detect. I guess the workaround is to unmatch as early as possible? I was also exposed to many spam/scam profiles (promoting their Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube accounts) and Tinder somehow is not interested in combating this.

I'm an average male, I think they don't care that much to have me in their users' pool or I could be prohibitively horny and boring. Who knows.

OK and did you get around it? New phone etc?

Is there any recourse?

The "account" ban creeps over ie. using new phone number with old device or another device but with old Apple/Google account or phone number extends the ban. It seems the only solution is entirely new setup - phone device, phone number, Google/Apple account. Too bothersome for an individual but easy for spammers, one can get an impression while swiping.

Interesting. Certainly pretty scary!

Yikes to Tinder enforced celibacy!

more like status quo ante? IOW nothing to be afraid of.

> This scares the hell out of me that one mega conglomerate with it's algorithms has control over your procreation and deep knowledge of your sex life, all linked to your real identity.

Only if you give it to them?