B2.4 Case Study – Doing Research in Tinder

A researcher wishes to study public interactions on a dating platform such as Tinder. Although the posts under scrutiny are public, rather than through private messaging, she needs to sign up to Tinder to view them. By signing up, she has to fill in a registration form including questions such as “I am a woman looking for a man/woman” etc.

It is therefore reasonable to think that users of the platform expect that other people viewing their profile might be doing so for similar (dating) reasons. The researcher is also aware that there may be people under the age of 18 using the platform. The users of the platform are aware that there is a very large number of people using the platform and potentially able to access their profile.

Questions:

1. What you think are the most relevant ethical concerns in this study?
2. Do you think that the researcher can ethically access and re-‐publish this data (given that e.g. the users of the platform have a reasonable expectation that people seeing their data are like‐ minded, i.e. using the platform for similar reasons)? Should the data then be considered not fully public after all?
3. How should the chance that there could be vulnerable people (such as children) using the platform influence the ethical design of the research?
4. Is the data likely to be sensitive? And if so how that would influence the design?