Cursed New Dating App Matches You Based on the Most Deranged Thing We Can Imagine
A newly-developed dating app matches potential lovers based on their entire internet browsing histories — and we're not quite sure how we feel about it.
As Wired reports, the new service is straightforwardly-named "Browser Dating," and is the brainchild of Belgian artiste provocateur Dries Depoorter.
After years creating one-off projects like "Shirt," a top that increases one euro each time it's purchased, Depoorter took a different route with his new app that invites lonely users to upload their entire internet footprint — blessedly sans "Incognito" mode — in pursuit of love.
"Instead of choosing the best pictures or best things about yourself, this will show a side of you that you'd never pick," the artist says of the site, which launched earlier in June. "You're not able to choose from your search history — you have to upload all of it."
If that sounds like a privacy nightmare to you, you're not alone — and although Depoorter claims Browser Dating "is not exposed to the internet," Futurism found when going through the site's application process that that might not be the case.
Pretty soon into the application, Browser Dating asks users to download an extension that will give the site permission to access and export your browsing history. Though Depoorter stores user information on Firebase, Google's data storage platform used in developing AI apps, there's no reason that bad actors couldn't breach the extension itself, as we've seen as recently as February of this year.
As Wired notes, the artist has previously played with the concept of privacy invasion. In 2018, for instance, he used public surveillance camera footage of people jaywalking to create art. The "surveillance artist," as the New York Times once called Depoorter, returned to his voyeurism for "The Follower," a 2022 project that used webcams in public spaces to record people as they took selfies.
In both projects, it seems that Depoorter published footage of his unwitting subjects without consent — which doesn't exactly set a great precedent for his new app, though he insists it's not a gimmick.
We've reached out to the artist to ask what precautions, if any, he's taken to protect against any breach of the Browser Dating extension.
All told, this Futurism reporter didn't complete the site's registration once asked to download the extension. As always, it's better to be safe than sorry.
More on dating and privacy: Woman Alarmed When Date Uses ChatGPT to Psychologically Profile Her
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