FTM: ‘Location military personnel easy to track thanks to Tinder’

Using Tinder, it’s easy to locate military personnel, regardless of whether they are at home or abroad.

Follow The Money (FTM) was able to monitor travel movements of hundreds of Dutch soldiers from all departments of the armed forces at Dutch barracks, as well as at NATO bases and training grounds in Europe, including colleagues from Germany and the United States.

According to the Dutch news outlet, military personnel share a lot of information about their work on their dating profiles. And the way Tinder is built, it makes it quite easy to find military personnel, and thus potential targets, and map their patterns.

By using the dating app, the identity, position, place of residence and travel movements of military personnel at home and abroad are easily figured out.

FTM created three Tinder accounts and spoofed its location to military sensitive locations in the Netherlands and abroad. The dating app then displayed all profiles within a certain radius, of which hundreds of accounts were from military personnel. These often disclosed their positions themselves on their profiles.

Because Tinder indicates how far away a user is from such a profile, FTM was able to find out the exact locations of these soldiers. The news outlet did this by spoofing its own location at three different positions and calculating the distance to the profile it was interested in.

By continuously doing so, FTM was able to keep track of an account as long as the person was logged into Tinder. Among other things, the news outlet discovered from several military personnel where they lived, where they went out and where they were deployed to.

According to FTM, the way military personnel were so easily tracked down, poses a threat to our national security. As a matter of fact, foreign intelligence agencies use dating apps like Tinder for espionage. The use of these dating apps has not been regulated by the Dutch Department of Defense.

A spokesperson of Tinder says the company does take technical measures to prevent users from being tracked, but doesn’t share any details about this. In addition, he says that it’s the users’ responsibility to manage their own privacy settings to reduce the chance of abuse.

In October, Le Monde wrote a similar story. The French newspaper said it was able to track down the location of politicians because their security staff were leaking location data and other relevant information because they were using fitness tracking app Strava.