For $5, you can find out if your S.O. is 'cheating' on Tinder

In a society where an affair is just a right-swipe away, snooping through your partner's phone can be tempting.

While most people would argue that creating a dialogue around trust is preferable, a controversial new website makes snooping easier than memorizing their phone's passcode.

Swipe Buster, a service that was quietly released last week, allows users to input information regarding their loved one, an ex, a coworker, or really whomever they're curious about, to find out if they're using the dating app Tinder. 

A user adds the person's name, age and the last place they most likely used the location-based app.

To collect the data, Swipe Buster says it uses Tinder's API (application programming interface), which contains some information about its user pool.

Mashable tech reporters examined the API and discovered that the user data is not as easily accessible as Swipe Buster's creator claimed to Vanity Fair. But Tinder does not obfuscate the data -- it doesn't go out of its way to hide user activity and login information -- so if you know how to use the API and what to do with the data once you get it, you can access details that many users would probably want kept private.

Swipe Buster users see Tinder profiles from the general location they specify that match the first name they input (because Tinder uses first names only). It's then up to the snooper to go through the pictures to find (or, hopefully, not find) the person they're looking for. 

Swipe Buster users can then see the Tinder users' pictures, when they were last online, and if they are looking for men or women. The information costs $5.

While exposing infidelity is something many people support, the company claims the goal is not necessarily to find cheaters or embarrass people. 

"We decided to show people an example of how much data about them is available."

In an email exchange with Mashable, the creator of Swipe Buster, who only refers to himself as Carlos, says the goal of the application is to make people aware of how exposed their information is online. 

"This is not a Tinder-specific issue," he said. "People have way too much information about themselves available publicly. People should be aware of the privacy settings on all the services they use. Hopefully this conversation will remind a significant amount of people of that."

Reverse-engineering Tinder's API for a third party app is not illegal in this case (and it's not the first time it's been done), but it's nonetheless interesting that Swipe Buster's creator has opted to charge for the service.

Swipe Buster comes less than a year after the major hack of Ashley Madison, the site that encourages extramarital affairs, which exposed personal information from the site's (mostly male) users. 

Busting cheaters is nothing new to the Internet and there are several blogs dedicated to publicly embarrassing them. "Player Block" uses a person's name and phone number to find if they're an accused cheater, and "She's A Home Wrecker" is dedicated to registering people who have broken up relationships through infidelity. 

While the invasion of privacy may be unsettling, Internet users nowadays tend to be relatively well aware of how social services often hand over data to third-party companies -- which, in theory, could reverse-engineer the process -- and reveal a bit more than what the user bargained for. 

On the other hand, as Mic pointed out, a service that exposes information about users' dating lives could cause potential harm to people -- women in particular -- who have had abusive or controlling partners who may be trying to track them.

Tinder has not yet responded to a request for comment.

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