The makers of the gay dating app Jack’d was fined $240,000 by the New York Attorney General’s Office for leaking private data and nude photos.
Online Buddies, Inc. was charged with failure to protect private photos of users of its ‘Jack’d’ dating application, and the nude images of approximately 1,900 users in the gay, bisexual, and transgender community, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release.
The company was notified of the vulnerability which exposed the pictures in February 2018 as well as other backend vulnerabilities that could have exposed location data, device ID, operating system versions, last login dates, and hashed passwords. Despite knowing of the flaws, the app’s developers only took action after receiving multiple press inquiries.
The dating app has approximately 7,000 active users in New York and claims to have hundreds of thousands of active users around the world.
“This app put users’ sensitive information and private photos at risk of exposure and the company didn’t do anything about it for a full year just so that they could continue to make a profit,” said Attorney General James. “This was an invasion of privacy for thousands of New Yorkers.”
