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The Subcommittee on Supervision and Reform of the United States Congress has announced that it will investigate dating applications such as Tinder and Bumble for allegedly allowing minors and sex offenders to use their services.

Raja Krishnamoorthi, president of the subcommittee, has sent letters to Bumble, Grindr, The Meet Group and Match Group - which manages several dating apps, including Tinder and OkCupid - in which he asks companies to explain the procedures they carry out to verify the age of the users.

In addition, in his letters Krishnamoorthi also asks that they detail how they verify that their users are not sexual aggressors, as well as the privacy policies of their services.

"Our concern about the use of dating applications by minors is intensified after reports that many of these free 'apps' allow sex offenders to use them, while in the paid versions they exclude sex offenders," he said. Krishnamoorthi stressed in a statement, as collected by Time magazine.

Krishnamoorthi has also stressed that "protection against sex offenders should not be a luxury limited to paying users."

For its part, the Match Group company has stated that it uses "all possible tools" so that neither minors nor sex offenders use its services and that it invests in technology to keep its users safe.

Also, Match Group has insisted that the problem requires the efforts of other parties such as application stores, since they know the data of their users.

The research also aims to address concerns about the use of user data from these applications, such as sexual orientation, gender identity and drug and alcohol use.

The US House of Representatives subcommittee has referred to a study published in the middle of this month by the Norwegian Consumer Council in which it states that Tinder, Grindr and OkCupid share confidential data of their users.

The study claims that these applications share data on the IP address, location, sexuality and other types of personal information of users, and contrasts it with the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union, ensuring that "sharing and the processing of a large amount of this data seems to be illegal. "

The Gizmodo website reported Monday that Tinder's panic button shares user data with advertising technology companies, including Facebook and YouTube.

Tinder said he is working on this new feature so that users can notify if they are in a dangerous situation. In order to enable this feature, they will have to download the Noonlight application, which can activate requests to emergency services using a button.

However, by downloading this 'app' - which is free - several companies would obtain user data from Tinder through Noonlight.

According to the privacy policy of Noonlight, when using the application the user authorizes the company to share their information with "relevant emergency equipment", as well as with third parties. Noonlight co-founder Nick Droege told Gizmodo that Facebook, YouTube, Branch, Appboy and Kochava are among his "business partners."

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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