FTC levies no fines after dating site caught giving AI company user data
The company behind popular dating site OkCupid has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, or FTC.
The commission alleged Match Group Americas shared users’ personal data with a third party without permission from those users. The group that got hold of the private data is an AI firm with ties to the dating site’s founders.
Lawsuit settlement
In its lawsuit, the FTC claimed OkCupid gave unauthorized third-party access to the data of millions of users despite OkCupid’s own privacy policies.
“They found that these companies told users that they would not share their data with third parties, and they shared it,” Lorrie Cranor, director of the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, told Straight Arrow News.
In OkCupid’s privacy policy, the company states that it won’t share user data with any third party except for service providers, business partners, and other entities within its family of businesses.
The FTC said the third party at the basis of this lawsuit, an AI company called Clarifai, was none of those things.
“The FTC enforces the privacy promises that companies make,” Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said. “We will investigate, and where appropriate, take action against companies that promise to safeguard your data but fail to follow through—even if that means we have to enforce our Civil Investigative Demands in court.”
A spokesperson for OkCupid told Reuters that the practices in question are outdated and “this does not reflect how OkCupid operates today.”
As part of the settlement, OkCupid and Match are permanently prohibited from misrepresenting the extent to which they “collect, maintain, use, disclose, delete or protect any personal information,” including photos. They are also prohibited from misrepresenting the purpose for collecting data and the function of privacy controls provided to users.
The settlement did not include any monetary fines.
“There’s only so much that the FTC has the authority to do,” Cranor said. “They can do fines. They can demand changes and practices. They can require various types of audits and things like that, but there are limits to what they seem to be able to do.”
Data sharing
Among the data shared with Clarifai are user photos, location and more.
“There are many reasons why people would not want the information on data on dating websites to be shared beyond the intended audience,” Cranor said. “There are people who don’t want family members, work colleagues, bosses, to know that they’re using an online dating service, or to know the types of things that they might reveal to prospective dates. There may be people who are in the closet, who are looking for same sex partners that they don’t want that revealed.”
Among the many things Clarifai does is facial recognition. The company uses those tools more for businesses than consumer-facing, which allows those businesses to determine how to use that technology.
The FTC also revealed the founders of OkCupid were financial investors in Clarifai and that the two companies had no official business relationship.
Meanwhile, the FTC said those data-sharing practices have been going on since 2014, and that Match and OkCupid took extensive steps to conceal these practices and impede the investigation.
“The fact that these dating apps lied about the privacy protections, I think, is very troubling,” Cranor said. “But it’s good to see that there is now some enforcement.”
Cranor said it’s something the agency has put a stronger focus on over the last two decades.
“The problem is that they don’t have the resources to go after every last company that is brought to their attention that is doing something like this,” she added.
Part of the issue is that when it comes to data protection, there aren’t a lot of federal protections.
“Instead, we have rules that require companies not to make deceptive or false statements, and so I believe the FTC is using that authority to say, ‘Hey, you told consumers you were going to protect their data, and then you didn’t,’” Cranor said.
Other FTC issues
This latest settlement is not Match’s first run-in with the FTC. In August 2025, the Match Group agreed to settle another FTC lawsuit.
That one was over alleged deceptive advertising, cancellation and billing practices. The FTC said Match misled users about “guarantees,” made it hard for customers to cancel subscriptions and retaliated against customers who initiated failed chargebacks.
In that instance, Match agreed to pay $14 million, which the FTC plans to use to dole out to impacted consumers.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
