IN 2018, YOU'D be forgiven for assuming that any sensitive app encrypts its connection from your phone to the cloud, so that the stranger two tables away at the coffee shop can't pull your secrets off the local Wi-Fi. That goes double for apps as personal as online dating services.

But if you assumed that basic privacy protection for the world's most popular dating app, you'd be mistaken: As one application security company has found, Tinder's mobile apps still lack the standard encryption necessary to keep your photos, swipes, and matches hidden from snoops. 

At 9.24pm (and one second) on the night of Wednesday 18 December 2013, from the second arrondissement of Paris, I wrote “Hello!” to my first ever Tinder match. Since that day I’ve fired up the app 920 times and matched with 870 different people. I recall a few of them very well: the ones who either became lovers, friends or terrible first dates. I’ve forgotten all the others. But Tinder has not.

The dating app has 800 pages of information on me, and probably on you too if you are also one of its 50 million users. In March I asked Tinder to grant me access to my personal data. Every European citizen is allowed to do so under EU data protection law, yet very few actually do, according to Tinder.