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Profiling and automated decision-making at Plenty of Fish

At Plenty of Fish, your privacy is a top priority. It is at the core of the way we design and build the services and products you know and love so that you can fully trust them and focus on building meaningful connections.

As part of our commitment to transparency in the way we process your information, we explain here what automated decision-making and profiling are, why it is at the very heart of our service (in fact, it’s probably the reason you love using our products!) and how you benefit from it. 

 

What is automated decision-making and profiling?

Various privacy laws in the US and around the world address automated decision-making and profiling. For example, European's data protection framework, the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), provides the following definitions:

  • Automated individual decision-making: making a decision about an individual solely by automated means (i.e., using computers and algorithms only, without any human involvement in the decision-making process);
  • Profiling: evaluating certain things about an individual, including interests, preferences or behavior, through automated processing of personal data (e.g., using computers and algorithms to determine someone’s interests based on his or her online behavior).


How does Plenty of Fish use automated decision-making or profiling?

 

Automated decision-making and profiling are invisible features that are at the core of the services you know and love, upon which we constantly improve and without which we would be unable to help you build meaningful connections.

We use these features for the following reasons:

 

  1. To help connect you with other users.

    We use the information you and other members of the Plenty of Fish community provide us directly or through your use of the service (including, for example, age, gender, location, interests, and who you like, skip, or match with) to power our proprietary matching algorithm and recommend compatible people to you. We use the same process to recommend you to other users.

     
  2. To show you ads and offers that may be of interest to you.

    We use information about you to show you useful and relevant ads on and off our service and measure the effectiveness of these ads. We also use information about you to deliver offers and discounts tailored to your profile.
     
  3. To promote safety and security.

    We use automated decision-making and profiling as part of our moderation efforts (for example, removing bots), as well as to promote the safety and security of our users by making it easier to prevent illegal and unauthorized actions from happening and to swiftly and efficiently detect and fight those actions when they happen.

    This processing may lead to suspension or account closure for users who are reported or found to engage in illegal or unauthorized activities, both on and off our services, without prejudice to other legal actions we could take.

Learn more

See our Privacy Policy to learn more about how we process personal data (Section 4 - “How We Use Data”) and your rights (Section 8 - “Your Rights”). If you close your account, your data will be retained only for limited purposes and then deleted, as described in our Privacy Policy ( Section 9 - “How Long We Retain Your Data”).