Today (January 16), Gizmodo reported that at least 70,000 photos of women, scraped from profiles on the dating app Tinder, are circulating on cybercrime forums

The photos were allegedly discovered by Aaron DeVera, a security researcher for a company called White Ops, who told Gizmodo that the images are associated with text files containing about 16,000 Tinder user IDs This may represent the total number of Tinder users compromised

However, I don't know what advice to give on this matter Normally, we would advise affected users to change their account passwords, but Tinder did not tell Gizmodo whether it plans to notify affected users

There is also the question of whether this constitutes an invasion of privacy or a data breach The image has already been published on Tinder and is therefore already public

And while scraping all of these images from Tinder is certainly a violation of Tinder's terms of service, it is not certain whether it constitutes theft or illegal activity

There is currently no indication that real names are associated with the images, but with user ID and image matching algorithms, it would not be difficult to quickly build that kind of data

Speaking of such algorithms, Gizmodo speculates that images could be used to train facial recognition software, as has happened before

In other words, while this is certainly creepy, it may not actually be dangerous Just be aware that if you upload a photo to Tinder or any other online dating service, it doesn't necessarily mean it will be locked there forever