#3fun

Four major dating apps expose precise locations of 10 million users

Researchers Pen Test Partners say four popular mobile applications offering dating and meetup services have security flaws which allow for the precise location tracking of users.

Charlie Osborne for ZDNet:

This week, Pen Test Partners said that Grindr, Romeo, and Recon have all been leaking the precise location of users and it has been possible to develop a tool able to collate the exposed GPS…

A dating app designed for arranging threesomes has been described as a “privacy train wreck” by security experts after the software was found to reveal real-time locations, birth dates, chat data and even photographs of its 1.5 million users. The app, 3fun, revealed users with locations appearing to be in 10 Downing Street in London, and the White House and the US Supreme Court in Washington DC, according to a report on cyber security firm Pen Test Partners’ website. 

 Other dating apps, including Grindr, Romeo and Recon have recently also been found to have been revealing the exact location of users, but in those cases users’ precise locations were calculated by triangulating distances from three different places. On 3fun, the exact co-ordinates, accurate to within a building, were accessible through the app. Furthermore, private photographs were accessible too. Pen Test Partners said 3fun had “probably the worst security for any dating app we’ve ever seen”.