It's not easy to create a winning profile on dating apps like Tinder, yet one new feature aimed at helping struggling users has been branded creepy after it can access your most intimate moments.
First impressions are everything on dating apps, and you'll find no success on something like Tinder if your profile doesn't look great to anyone eagerly swiping away through their potential matches.
While things like your hobbies, bio, and even perhaps your height can be deal breakers, by far the biggest factor that defines how successful you are at finding matches are your photos.
One man who has swiped over 2 million times found out the hard way that pictures of you holding a fish are a no-go, but it can often be difficult to know what works best for each individual person without advice from the outside.
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As shared by the New York Post, that's precisely why Tinder has introduced its very own AI-powered picture scanning tool, where you allow the app to scan your camera roll in an attempt to analyze your personality and create the best match for you.
It sounds great in theory, as it would hypothetically be able to provide better matches between users that they might not have otherwise encountered, yet in practice many consider it to be a privacy nightmare that only increases the surveillance people face on a daily basis.
One user on X argued that "Tinder just built a surveillance feature and called it a personality quiz," adding that "the camera roll is the most intimate dataset on your phone."
Not everyone is going to have intimate or NSFW photos stored on their device, yet those that do might not be too happy that they're being scanned by AI that not only accesses your most private moments, but potentially trains its own data sets on them too.
Another added that "this feels like a Black Mirror episode," whereas a third noted that "'find my vibe' is a nice way of saying 'train on my private life so the app can monetize me better'."
It is thankfully an opt-in feature – at least for the time being – meaning that users have to actively seek out the 'vibe scanning' before it has access to your photo library, yet some remain skeptical that this will become a core feature of the app in the future as AI becomes increasingly prevalent in every aspect of life.