| Title | Engineer Tricks Male Tinder Users into Flirting with Each Other | |
| Date | Monday March 30 2015, @02:37PM | |
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| from the Don't-you-look-at-my-bum! dept. | ||
This story has been picked up by a number of media outlets, including Der Spiegel[German language article], The Verge, Huffington Post, The Week and Naked Security.
The Verge had this take on some of the details of the hack and the ensuing fall-out:
...over the last few weeks, a California-based computer engineer — we’ll call him Patrick — has pitted heterosexual male against heterosexual male. Patrick’s program identifies two men who "like" one of his bait profiles (the first used prominent vlogger Boxxy's image; the second used an acquaintance who had given Patrick consent) and matched them to each other. The suitors’ messages — some aggressive, others mundane, but all of them unabashedly flirtatious — are then relayed, back and forth, to one another through the dummy profile.
Tinder is notoriously vulnerable to hacks: in 2013, a loophole in the app could be harnessed to reveal users’ locations to within 100 feet. Last summer, Valleywag reported on a number of techies who tweaked the system to automatically "mass-like" every girl they come across.
Patrick was a Tinder user (in fact, it's where he met his current girlfriend) and says that female friends of his would often complain about the messages they received on Tinder. "The original idea was to throw that back into the face of the people doing it to see how they would react." Initially, he set out to build a Twitter bot that tweeted every first message a female friend received, but then he looked into Tinder’s API and found it had little safeguard from more extensive tweaks. "Tinder makes it surprisingly easy to bot their system. As long as you have a Facebook authentication token, you can behave as a robot as if you were a person."
I remember when people would do this to each other on Usenet in alt.soc.sex chat rooms. My buddy Dave would trek to the computer cluster on the main quad to do it when he was bored; he would put himself in stitches and occasionally return very, very disturbed.
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printed from SoylentNews, Engineer Tricks Male Tinder Users into Flirting with Each Other on 2024-04-24 13:03:21