How we used Tinder to catch the thief robbing startups in SF

Re:How we used Tinder to catch the thief robbing startups in SF by swatow on Friday December 19, 2014 @05:16PM (#8774859)

tl;dr >We created a Tinder profile using a picture of the woman who broke into our office. This seemed like the easiest way to get her face in front of a few thousand San Francisco residents.

I was hoping for some ingenious use of tinder (like assuming the thief was a tinder user, and right swiping til they found them). Instead, they are simply spamming their "wanted" photo on tinder to get more eyeballs.

Crime is a serious matter. We should take appropriate measures to identify criminals and alert the police. Spamming is not an appropriate measure.

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Re:How we used Tinder to catch the thief robbing startups in SF by Shinkei on Friday December 19, 2014 @05:29PM (#8774933)

I think it's hard to judge so quickly when we could easily consider a sliding scale of importance. If someone steals a pack of gum from the local CVS, I put that much lower on the scale of importance than say an extreme of a child being kidnapped... or in this case, theft of thousands of dollars worth of computers including data, work, etc. We accept that "Amber Alerts" flash on our phones, highways, emergency systems because society has decided that it's important to get a lot of eyeballs. It's a public good. Well Tinder is a private business, and as such they can certainly take down any 'spamming' photo. But I am willing to bet a lot of users--especially justice-minded users--could see this as a potential feature. Every 20-30 pics, a wanted ad is posted and if you contribute to catching them... you get a reward or maybe even some kind of 'good person flair' on Tinder. I'm just throwing ideas out there... but really trying to show you that what you see as just 'spamming' could actually be a huge opportunity both for Tinder users and Tinder itself.

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Re:How we used Tinder to catch the thief robbing startups in SF by swatow on Friday December 19, 2014 @05:35PM (#8774969)

It's pretty clear that this is a misuse of tinder according to its current usage. In some alternate reality or future world when tinder explicitly condones this, then your point would be valid.

I doubt tinder would consider this because the public benefit doesn't outweigh the annoyance to users. If you want to spread the word, you can use Facebook, which is actually better since people share what they think is important, so it's more tuned to people's actual priorities.

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Re:How we used Tinder to catch the thief robbing startups in SF by Shinkei on Friday December 19, 2014 @05:51PM (#8775016)

>a misuse of tinder according to its current usage

So is the supposedly ingenious idea you mentioned of assuming the burglar is a Tinder user and swiping through thousands of people (using bandwidth, making themselves a fake profile, etc.) to find the correct one. They offloaded the work of 1 second per thousands of people, rather than hours onto a single or small group of people... for which there was no guarantee of success and no real 'end.'

I think that their idea was pretty ingenious, especially if they are successful in the end.

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