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From the article: > But [the app] doesn’t do so by hacking into Tinder, or even by “scraping” the app manually. Instead, it searches the database using Tinder’
by Others 11y ago
From the article:
> But [the app] doesn’t do so by hacking into Tinder, or even by “scraping” the app manually. Instead, it searches the database using Tinder’s official API, which is intended for use by third-party developers who want to write software that plugs in with the site. All the information that it can reveal is considered public by the company, and revealed through the API with few safeguards.
- archgoon 11y agoYes; that is the line that danso noticed. However, nemothekid tried to verify it and was unsuccessful in finding any documentation for this presumbably publically available API. A github gist is the top google result for 'Tinder API documentation' https://gist.github.com/rtt/10403467 https://gist.github.com/rtt/10403467 which suggests that Tinder does not provide a public official API, people have simply reverse engineered the network requests of the application. In short, the article is wrong.
- danso 11y agoThanks for doing the Googling for me...should have assumed that the reported article and/or the people behind the app would be unreliable sources...any company of Tinder's size that puts the effort into making a public API would make relatively decent documentation that would show up in a cursory Google search result. Also part of the lesson on "What is an API?": the concept that some companies do not have an incentive to make an API...and Tinder, for many good reasons, is one of those.
- roywiggins 11y agoAnd worse, it is just regurgitating the Vanity Fair article, which has the same claim about a public API and is just as wrong. Great "journalism" there!
- barsonme 11y agoI'm curious if anybody else has links to documentation for other non-public APIs. It's interesting to see how companies structure their APIs, and public APIs usually seem to be much different from private.