“Do I not know you by your face?” - Twelfth Night, Act 1 Scene 5 Another day, another TikTok story. Last time, reporters found that TikTok Shop was allowing ads tailored to GPS-savvy stalkers. This time, it’s ads for Cheaterbuster – which represents yet one more invasive abuse of facial recognition technology, often with images taken from the Tinder dating app. Cheaterbuster’s “Facetrace” feature, which 404 Media verified, allows users to “discover someone’s online presence from a single selfie.” That’s right, you need only upload a photo of your “loved one” and Cheaterbuster’s AI scours the web in search of that person’s Tinder profile, for $18 per search. Notably, Tinder itself has nothing to do with this according to Sullivan Davis and other bloggers. “Not only do we not authorize this practice, it is squarely against our policies,” the company told 404 Media. It appears that sites like Cheaterbuster (sadly, there are others) are scraping publicly available profiles (pro tip – pay for Tinder tiers that allow private mode). The Mary Sue webzine points out that any number of TikTok accounts are really just paid marketing fronts for Cheaterbuster. “Aurora” was applauded by naïve users who believed that she was literally dumping her boyfriend (by driving him to the landfill) after Cheaterbuster saved the day. According to 404, Cheaterbuster’s affiliate program pays more than YouTube does. About a year ago, two Harvard students hacked Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses to identify strangers on the subway. As we wrote at the time, “Armed with this technology, your neighborhood creep could easily spot a woman walking down the street and be there when she arrives at her front doorstep.” Now thanks to TikTok and Cheaterbuster, he could know all about her and just what to say. Comments are closed.
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