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fliptop [soylentnews.org] writes:

The regulatory price for handing three million people's dating photos to a facial recognition startup turned out to be a promise to behave [reclaimthenet.org]:

Nearly three million people uploaded photos to OkCupid expecting those images would stay on a dating app. Instead, the photos ended up training facial recognition software, handed over by the company’s own founders to an AI firm they’d personally invested in.

Match Group settled [ftc.gov] a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit last week over the transfer, which the agency says violated OkCupid’s privacy policy and was actively covered up for years. The consent decree permanently bars Match Group and OkCupid from misrepresenting their data practices and puts them under compliance reporting for a decade.

The settlement carries no financial penalty.

[...] The data transfer happened in September 2014. Clarifai, an AI company building image recognition systems, asked OkCupid for a large dataset of user photos.

The request wasn’t routed through a business development team or vetted by legal. OkCupid’s founders were financially invested in Clarifai, and the ask came on that basis, one investor helping out another. OkCupid’s president and chief technology officer were directly involved in the data transfer, and one of the founders allegedly sent the photos from his personal email account, bypassing any corporate oversight or audit trail.

No contract governed the handoff. No restrictions were placed on what Clarifai could do with the data. Clarifai never provided any business services to OkCupid.

[...] When The New York Times reported on the arrangement in 2019 [nytimes.com], OkCupid’s response was carefully evasive. The company told the paper that Clarifai had contacted OkCupid about a possible collaboration and that no commercial agreement had been entered into. That framing was technically true and functionally misleading. There was no commercial agreement because the data was given away for free, a favor between a company and its founders’ investment. The FTC alleged that OkCupid did not address whether Clarifai had gained access to photos without consent, and described the response as part of a broader pattern of concealment. The agency said it ultimately had to enforce its Civil Investigative Demand in federal court after OkCupid obstructed the investigation.

[...] The settlement, filed March 30, 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, permanently prohibits misrepresenting data collection, use, and disclosure practices. Match Group did not admit wrongdoing. The Commission vote was 2-0.

Also at Yahoo! [yahoo.com] and The Verge [theverge.com].

Original Submission