Tantan no match for Tinder: China’s rival to the popular dating app exposes privacy risk with photos, chatlogs, location all accessible
Hong Kong based expert uses free Wifi and developer’s program to demonstrate how easy it is to hack TanTan, the Chinese dating app used by millions
A Tinder-style Chinese dating app with millions of users is leaving its members’ privacy dangerously unprotected, according to a Hong Kong technology expert.
Using just free Wifi and an Apple developer’s program, cybersecurity expert Larry Salibra said he could access Tantan users’ photos, details, chat logs and even their location.
Tantan’s chief executive and co-founder Yu Wang said while security complaints weren’t as bad as suggested, he admitted changes needed to be made to protect users’ privacy on his app.
The questions over the app’s privacy come just four months after dating website Ashley Madison, which targeted married people, suffered a massive leak of user information that has been linked to some suicides.
“I found they weren’t encrypting anything, including your password … You can see anything the clients enter into the app and anything the client sends back to the server: their phone number, their password, their location coordinates,” Salibra said.
Tantan, which translates as ‘scouting around’, was founded in July 2014, using a similar interface to popular dating app Tinder, and had drawn about two million users in one year, according to the company.