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Scraping Tinder selfies to make a dataset for AI experiments
- yoodenvranx 10y agoI am still waiting for someone to scrape all the images of naked people on reddit/imgur and do some classification based on the subreddit from which the image comes from. (For those who don't know: a lot of porn subreddits are _highly_ specific to a certain topic which might help for classification)
- ben_jones 10y agoWe were there a year ago [1]. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/17/findface-face-recognition-app-end-public-anonymity-vkontakte https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/17/findface-...
- minimaxir 10y agoThat is not the same case morally as Tinder because photos posted on Reddit are public and have no expectation of privacy. (also, it's not technically complex to get the image URLs from the Reddit data dumps, albeit getting the images themselves will likely hit a ToS violation)
- pjc50 10y agoI suspect someone out there is building the weapon of mass de-anonymisation.
- dvt 10y agoData set no longer exists, Tinder probably sent a C&D. I did something similar with FB a while ago -- scraped all photos of people that "Liked" a certain topic. It's no longer possible. Definitely feels wrong having such easy access to people's pictures; it leads to interesting questions: is your face PII? Do you have ownership rights to your face? What about facial recognition algorithms that use pictures you upload to FB, Instagram, Tinder, etc. to generate, e.g., Haar cascades?
- noobermin 10y ago>Is your face PII [personally identifiable information]? Before computers existed, PII referred to information someone (ie., a human individual) can use to personally identify someone and probably[0] still does. I'd say a picture of someone is a good way to identify someone. [0] The "probably" is sarcastic. Of course it is PII.
- TillE 10y agoBasic copyright protections mean you have zero rights to random photos you grab from some internet service. It's probably ok to just download them, but doing anything with them creates a derivative work which you cannot distribute without permission. My point is, this kind of thing is already illegal.
- dvt 10y agoWhat about services that use my face for things like facial recognition (without explicit consent)?
- alexc05 10y agoExperiments without informed consent. While Tinder might have something in their T&C which requires that they're allowed to look at the data, it isn't ethical for third parties to scrape and use that same data without informed consent. Interestingly though, I wouldn't think the same of an instagram scrape. Probably because insta is public by design, while tinder is expected to be local, requires a login and ostensibly is for the purpose of looking for companionship.
- noobermin 10y agoAt the bottom of the article, Tinder claimed he violated their TOS.
- denzil_correa 10y ago> Probably because insta is public by design There's a difference between public and public domain. Just because something is public, doesn't mean you are free to use it as you wish. You may still require permission to use it for tasks beyond the originally intended purpose.
- alexc05 10y agoSee, I agree and disagree with that. People on tinder are probably reasonably expecting that their pictures are used for meeting up with locals for the purposes of dating. The debate about whether this is a reasonable expectation isn't really what I'm on about. (Obviously, as techie types, we have a different understanding of how private this stuff really is) On instagram, it is a broadcasting and publishing platform and it is very clear that by posting a photo, on a non-private-account the photo can be seen and generally browsed by others. A researcher who conducts a study of "looking at" 400k public instagram photos is doing a different thing than spoofing their location and auto-swiping through 400k lonely hearts. Obviously people disagree with this since I'm getting downvotes for my position. This is certainly my opinion But I do feel like running a study against one isn't unethical while the other is. Of course, that should be caveated that "republishing" the scraped data is unreasonable in both cases (IMO). I also think things like this artist http://fortune.com/2015/05/26/instagram-copyright-art/ http://fortune.com/2015/05/26/instagram-copyright-art/ are reprehensible... but that's art, not science and doesn't actually have the same expectation to abide by ethical principles.
- ourcat 10y agoPretty tasteless array name in there: `for hoe in hoes:` which exposes the base mentality of the coder.
- thinknot 10y agoYes, this codebase is old, because currently you'd use "for thot in thots:"
- helthanatos 10y agoWell, it's probably more showing of a sense of humor.
- dvt 10y agoI'm pretty liberal about stuff like this and I honestly think it's pretty tasteless also. I've often said that the sexism issue in tech is overblown (due to various agendas at work) but when you see shit like this (especially in the context of Tinder, a dating app), it's just hard to deny :/
- thinknot 10y agoA woman who's signed up for an app just to get fucked by a stranger is, well, a whore. It's right there in the dictionary. The only thing I lament is the non-existence of a similar term to describe men, because promiscuity is not only negative when women do it, of course.
- zepto 10y agoDo you think this of all dating apps?
- Jare 10y agoBoth. The problem is that a tasteless joke is usually worse than no joke at all.
- tdfx 10y ago
- zitterbewegung 10y agoNowadays scraping is the Uber of data collection . You will be fraught with legal problems with the dataset and people will block you if you become a big enough problem.
- hkon 10y ago"you wouldn't download an image"
- icantdrive55 10y agoWe need to stop giving out our facial pictures freely. Just post the back of your head. I had a relative who went to a dentist last week. The dentist wanted a head shot. I told her, just tell him no, and unless your going to just accept what my insurance sends you, I'll find another Wingnut. Giving up our pictures is just crazy. As to companies protecting data sets, there's always a work around. Taking a picture of the screen will always be available.
- kolbe 10y agoQuestion unrelated to the article, but related to that link: is anyone else developing a knee-jerk reaction to just leaving a web site the moment they ask you to turn ad-block off?
- ben_jones 10y agoLet's not forget that pictures like this are used for social engineering attacks in domains ranging from finance to prostitution to blackmail. I honestly don't care about the researcher (assuming he doesn't release the data set publicly). It's the responsibility of Facebook, Tinder, and similar sites which profit from such images, to go to extreme measures to protect them even if it incurs significant costs such as counter scraping.
- Odenwaelder 10y ago"40000 images, 20000 from each gender." - Dude, do you want to trigger SJWs?
- danso 10y ago> “I have often been disappointed,” he writes of other facial data sets. “The datasets tend to be extremely strict in their structure, and are usually too small. Tinder gives you access to thousands of people within miles of you. Why not leverage Tinder to build a better, larger facial dataset?” This guy sounds like a caricature of the exact kind of socially unaware techie who blithely implements dystopian-powering software, because having data and writing code is all that matters apparently. Privacy law admittedly isn't the simplest concept but you have to wonder how blissfully solipsistic someone has to be to write a simple script that scrapes proprietary data without asking himself, "this is so easy, I wonder why no one else has had this idea?" And then he released the data under CC0, just to add insult to injury by making CC look unethical.
- SkyMarshal 10y agoCC aside (which I'm not sure he has the right to release Tinder's data under any arbitrary license of his choosing, CC or otherwise), I'm actually ok with security and privacy vulnerabilities being openly exposed in this way. Some random hacker in his garage figures out how to do it and just does, and makes it completely public. The general public is so complacent about this stuff, it feels like events like this, or the fappening, motivate them far more than most advocacy does, while doing far less harm than a govt agency using it in secret could.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 10y agoIt's all fun and games until you violate the CFAA. Laws you may not like are still there to be enforced.
- joshumax 10y agoNow I feel bad for doing this exact thing with Tinder to create a data-set for determining age based on facial features... At least I didn't publicize it after and removed it when I was done
- 10y ago
- propman 10y agoThis is a serious ethical violation in my opinion. Like the sjsu student in that article, I am extremely uncomfortable with people of suspect moral compas analyzing my face without my consent. As a Bay Area frequent user of tinder, I do actually feel violated. Only one of my photos is public on my profile but with that you can find my name, my college, and then using basic data engineering you can find my phone number and address. Using face recognition you could theoretically scour the web for nudes or suspect information and stalk, blackmail or worse. I hope someone drops the hammer on this person to send a message and prevent future occurrences of this
- devrandomguy 10y agoI do not believe that it would be possible to prevent this sort of behavior by force. Any script kiddie could pull this off, and there are more born every day. Some of them barely even understand Western values, let alone have an incentive to value them. Rather than (edit: in addition to) relying on protection, we should rely on personal safety practices. Using our own portraits as avatars may have been a mistake, in hindsight. I will recommend to my friends, that they teach their children to use a photo of their favorite toy or something, instead of their own face.
- nojvek 9y agoTinder is very cut throat. The whole social network values people based on their appearances. When I was single I had written a bot on their v1 API when Tinder was first on app store. I was curious of their security and social dynamics. No intent to release anything in public. I had then created 5 different profiles of same picture, with different shades of skin color. Interesting results. I came to the conclusion that tinder wasn't for me. I had to try good ol' face to face interactions. I'm sure Tinder and snapchat are a trove of data to help study the science of human mating. Releasing a dataset online is crazy although I wonder what would happen if tinder got hacked and their data published on bittorrent like the fapgate with celebrities that happened a while ago. A security disaster like that is just waiting to happen.
- exabrial 10y agoAm I the only one who is greatly disturbed by the ethics of this? I don't think he had those user's consent, nor permission from Tinder.
- lemonsqueeze 10y agoNo one ever swiped right on him. This is his revenge. Imagine how disappointed he would be if someone took all his pictures of him, his wife/husband, and family members and released it under CC0. This is absolutely disgusting and shameful. How much of his actions you think are motivated by the fact that he likely never got a single women to swipe right, let alone go on a date with him?
- unityByFreedom 10y agoThis is an ugly thread. Just a heads up =)