Security and Safety Concerns Regarding Digital Dating Apps – Digital CxO Podcast EP115

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today I have Ron Zia. He is the CEO of Iron Wall by Inc.

Cogni. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well, Amanda.

Thank you very much for having me here. Happy to have you on the show. Can you share what services do you provide over there at Iron Wall?

By Incog, Iron Wall, by Incog, which is part of Incog. What we do is we remove the personal information of individuals and of people who belong to the government or, you know, have other security concerns from the internet in particular. We're not making 'em disappear.

We remove their name and their address and their name and their personal phone number from the internet so that there are less physical attacks, less vectors for phishing attacks, those kinds of things. Wonderful. Well, we are talking today about the digital world of dating and all the dating apps out there and the security and safety concerns surrounding the use of these apps.

So, you know, we know that there's a whole plethora of dating apps out there. People are turning more online, um, by the day to meet people and, um, dating online, getting to know people. What security and safety concerns should people have when they're using these apps?

Well, and I think there are, there are two things to add there really quickly. One is people turn to these digital apps typically for two reasons. Number one, a bigger pool of people to meet.

You know, you may not get out as much as you like to, or you may be working from home, so you don't have that same home interaction that you've had before. So it's, it's supposed to be a, a platform to meet more people and b, a platform to do it safely, that it should be safer to do this online than it is to meet a random stranger, you know, in a, in an area, in a, in a bar or somewhere else. Even though obviously these lead to those personal interactions.

So what, what's happening though is the safety component is a big concern, and I'd say it's especially a concern for women. It's a concern for, for women of color, it's, uh, a concern for younger women, uh, because again, safety is a big concern. And the idea here is what are these apps collecting your information for?

What are they doing with that information? And then how does that web that, that, that information get weaponized against the people who are using it and how it can it be weaponized? So that's really what we focus of when we look at, uh, dating apps.

Number one, what are they collecting? Number two, what are they doing with that information? Are they just using it to help you find the right person, or are they selling it?

Are they monetizing it? And then if people do get this personal information, how can it be used against you? So how can people who are using these dating apps find that information out before they start use using it?

So there's two ways you can do that. Uh, one is to look at the privacy, um, statement that every company has to have. So you can go on their website, go under privacy, you can look under their privacy structure in the app itself, and it'll generally tell you what their privacy standards are.

Knowing that and knowing, for example, I have a background in law and I get lost a lot of times reading these privacy statements, understand that they do try to sate it as much as they possibly can. So they'll say, sell things like they might say in one sentence, we don't sell your personal information and it, it makes it sound great. The first two sentences, start off with, we don't sell your information.

We're here for your privacy and we, you know, just want you to be safe. And then every sentence underneath it will say, but we do share it, we do trade it, we do barter it, we do give it to other people who then append information and give it back to us. So you don't just read the first two feel good sentences 'cause they're there to have you not read.

Understand that they're really long ones. Most of the time you can google their privacy and you'll find people who will talk about and help summarize what they do. But in general, assume that a company's gonna sell your information because there's more money in selling your information than and usually providing the product.

The second thing to understand is that they can only, that's not necessarily true, but for the most part, they can only share what you give them. So think to yourself what is necessary for you to do it to achieve your goal. You know, all of these sites are collecting sexual orientation, they're collecting political beliefs, they're collecting, you know, religious beliefs.

Think to yourself what's important to share, because if you don't wanna share it, then don't. If it's not gonna help you achieve your goal of meeting people, then don't provide the information. If you provide the, uh, information, assume that they are going to sell it and give it to other people.

Yeah, it's a little bit scary when you think about it because you have thousands of people sharing all this really personal information, and the company essentially has a big research study right in, right at their fingertips. Um, and it's kind of scary what they could do with that. When you think about it, It, it's extremely scary.

I mean, just think about in today's landscape, do you really want people to be able to tell you know what your political beliefs are? Do you really want people to be able to know, you know, what side of the Middle East crisis you're on? Or do you want people to know that?

If you know, if you are somebody who's part of the LE uh, you know, the LBGQ community, do you want people to be able to know that? Um, and, and even to a degree, do you want people to know that you're a single female that lives alone, you know that you're, and and obviously you have your picture and you have other things from there, but do you want all of those attributes to be out there? Is it gonna make you safer?

The other thing to remember is, the more I know about you, the more I can take that information, go online and find things that you haven't disclosed. That was my qualifier at the beginning where I was about to say, you know, they can only share what you give 'em, but that's not true. In most cases, these companies will then take this information, they'll give 'em to companies called data brokers.

And data brokers will collect that information. They'll collect information from the pizza place. You, you know, you order from, from the supermarket that you're, that you're part of a, you know, loyalty program.

They'll pull it all together and they'll sell it. And a lot of times we think, well, that information isn't that big of a deal, but think about just from ordering a pizza, you know, if you order a pizza, they're gonna ask you for your phone number, you're gonna give it to 'em, they don't need it, but you're gonna give it to 'em. Why?

Because it's habit. Why do they want it? Because they get $50 or so just for selling your, your phone number.

That's a lot more than they're gonna make on the pizza. And then what happens is with that information, they can tie you to where you live. They can tie you when they're delivering the pizza, which kind of tells 'em when you're home, you know, by the order size of your pizza, they can tell whether you're by yourself and whether you have an habit, a habit of ordering for one person or two people, are you ordering things that are traditionally for children.

Think about all that information that's being shared that then anybody, and I do mean anybody can go online and buy that information. So especially on a dating app, you have a bad interaction with somebody or you say, I'm not interested in taking this any further. That person can take the information that's available online and then go out and find out where you live, go to find out, you know, whether or not you're with somebody else or what the case may be.

That's the danger that's inherent in all of this. And by the way, it's not just that these companies share this information. Almost every single dating app has had some compromise of information.

Either it's been scraped off of their website or they've had a breach. So even if they intended not to share some of that information, they, they put themselves in a, in a position where people could steal that from them. What kind of, um, responsibility or accountability do these companies have with their apps, and what is the repercussions if there are security breaches for individuals using their apps In the us?

Sadly, the answer to that is very little. So, you know, uh, responsibility in the US tends to come from when something bad happens. So if there is a major breach, then is there a class action suit that's initiated?

Is there a negligence on the, on the company? And many times it is a negligent act. So, um, you know, 500 or 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, whatever it is, pieces of information on individuals gets released.

What happens next is really what determines how careful companies are gonna be. And in most cases, they'll let you know of the breach by law. They'll give you some type of thing like personal, you know, like, uh, identity theft information and say, oh, you know, what we're worried about is your, is your credit, so we'll monitor your credit and they'll hope that most people will let it go.

In those cases, when those kinds of things happen and nobody does anything, there is no accountability whatsoever. If instead people get together and do a a, a class action suit, which isn't easy, then that's where you start looking at, you know, 10, 11, you know, even a hundred million dollars in damages that makes a company not want to be there. So it, it really is what happens in the legal system rather than any other repercussion.

There are repercussions to your brands, but there's a major breach every single day in the us and I think we've just gotten to the point where we kind of write it off and we go, oh, we have credit monitoring, but let me say this, if you are especially a, a female, and again, I, I don't wanna sound sexist, but it's just the way that it co you know, it's just the way that the reality is, if you are a female, if you are a female of color, you're not just worried about your credit card being dinged, you're not worried about somebody, you know, breaking into your bank account, you, you're worried about somebody coming to your house, you're worrying about, you know, cyber bullying. The, the number one threat to women, especially young women online, is cyber bullying followed by sexual harassment. It's people taking personal information from you and exposing it in a way to embarrass you or to get back to you to have a grievance.

That's such a big concern that that doesn't go away when they sign you up for, for credit monitoring and say, oops. So number one, the, the companies have very, they, I think they have a lot of responsibility. The more information you cover, the more you should be responsible for it.

How much of that they actually follow is completely up to them. Absolutely. You know, and we hear about so many scams, um, via these dating apps.

In fact, just last night I was watching a Netflix documentary about huge, like 10 year catfishing scam through one of these sites. Um, so, and, and that's not it, just the manipulation. I've, I've watched other documentaries where they manipulated them to send money over a long period of time, um, thinking they were in love and it was all a scam.

So what advice do you have on the personal level for people using these apps? How, what should they do to protect themselves as best they can? I, I would say there's really three things you wanna focus on.

And, and by the way, Amanda, you, you hit it on the head. It's not just people steal, stealing your information. It's not just people, you know, having a grievance against you, whether it's imagined in their head or not, you know, taking action from that.

The when, when people, just to step back for a moment, when people threaten other people and when they carry through on their threats, a lot of times it's because it's a grievance, it's something personal. You, you know, it's not just, I didn't like the way you voted, it's that you voted in a way that hurt me, or you, you know, you parked your car in a way that killed my dog. Something that's very personal.

Nothing is more personal than our sexuality and our dating lives. So understand that those type of interactions are, are really personal and, and, and tend to, to reach out on this. So number one, understand that, understand that you're not in a protected environment.

That, that it probably isn't any safer than going into your typical bar. And, you know, and it might be marginally so, but there are bigger threats there. So number one, be alert.

Don't, don't take for granted that number one, the person you're talking to is truly who they meant to be. You know, use common sense just like you would in real time. If somebody, and I'm gonna use an extreme here.

If you walked into a bar and met somebody and they were disable disheveled and they didn't seem like they, they had bathed and they didn't seem like they were very educated and they said, I'm a doctor, you might question that. It's the same thing online. The second thing is understand what the app is going to do and ask about it.

What are you gonna do for my privacy? The analogy I like to do about this, it's not just to read it, but to ask, uh, you know, the analogy here, 10 people go into a pizza place and say, do you use real cheese? Sooner or later, the pizza parlor is gonna start saying, wow, our cheese content is important to our customers.

So if you ask, tell me about your privacy policy, yeah, I saw it online, what do you do with my information? You'll start getting these companies to understand that that's important. Number three, do not disclose any information that you don't have to disclose unless it helps your situation.

Don't tell 'em who you are, tell 'em what you do and, you know, give any personal information until it helps you. And number four is, and, and this is self-serving because obviously it's what we do, remove as much of your information online as possible. What you don't want is for somebody that you had an interaction with online and you decided that it ended or that you never wanted to start it, you don't want them to be able to type in your name and find where you live.

Again, for physical attacks, that's a big deal, but it's, if I know where you live or I know your phone number, I can find out so much information about you that I can get a scan. If I know that you're over 65 and you know, you're you're not married and that you're very affluent, obviously that sets up, it sets you up to be more of a scam than, you know, somebody who's 45. If I know that you're somebody who's 20 and lives alone, there's a lot more scams I can do with that information than if I didn't know that information.

Yeah, absolutely. It's scary what a big digital footprint we all have when we start thinking about it. It it is, and it comes from doing life.

And again, I'm not saying be a hermit, that that's not the point. I'm not even saying don't use social media or don't use dating, uh, apps. Just understand that nobody's looking out for you, number one.

So look out for yourself and do all the re you know, stranger danger, all the things our parents told us in real life. Apply on dating, uh, apps and apply in the online world. Second of all, again, don't give out information that doesn't help you.

Why, you know, you're allowed to say no. You're allowed to, to lie. You're allowed to say whatever you want that doesn't further what your game is, which is to honestly meet somebody and see if you have a connection and decide from there.

And three is remove your physical, you know, your, your, your digital footprint. It doesn't help anybody who's looking for where you live. Anybody who's looking to see what your age is and what you do, they are not your friends.

That's a good rule of thumb. Nobody who doesn't know you needs to know where you live. And those are the key things that I think people should always remember when they're on an app.

All right. Well, do you have one final key takeaway you can leave our audience with today? Absolutely.

Again, look to see what an app is asking you for and what they're gonna do for the information. If you read that privacy statement and you are not sure, ask them, send them their customer service and say, what do you do with my information? And what information do you collect, uh, do you collect?

What pieces are you gonna share with other people so that you become aware of what's out there and be able to, to then protect it and get rid of it. All right. Well thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing these valuable insights with us today.

My pleasure. I'm always happy to be here. Thank you, Amanda.

And thank you to our audience. Stay safe out there if you're using dating apps and stay tuned because there's more.