Tinder Wants Your Camera Roll and Calls It Chemistry (reclaimthenet.org)

Tinder’s parent company Match Group is piloting “Chemistry,” an AI-driven matching system that asks users questions and — with their permission — scans images in their phone’s Camera Roll to infer interests and personality traits. The trial, running in New Zealand and Australia, is being pitched as a core part of Tinder’s 2026 roadmap as the app seeks to reverse declining subscribers. Match also uses language models to prompt “Are you sure?” before potentially offensive messages and AI tools to recommend more attention-grabbing profile photos; the company admits the experiment carries a financial cost. For the AI/ML community this signals a growing trend: platforms are seeking richer, privately stored personal data as training or inference inputs to boost personalization. That creates technical opportunities (richer multimodal signals for preference modeling, on-device inference/federated learning to reduce data transfer) but also acute risks — sensitive inferences from private imagery, consent and data governance challenges, model bias amplified by intimate data, and regulatory scrutiny. The move underscores the need for robust privacy-preserving techniques, transparent consent UX, and careful evaluation of whether incremental matching gains justify broader access to users’ local data.