Why we share across Match Group Companies

To support daily business and technical operations

Operating OkCupid involves a lot of daily business and technical operations, including hosting data securely, providing you good customer care support, operating advertising and marketing campaigns, understanding what users like or dislike about our services so we can make them better, performing research and development, facilitating payments, managing revenue and accounting, fighting against spam, abuse, fraud and similar harmful behaviors, and others. We share information about you with affiliated companies so they can help us perform some of these daily operations as our service providers.

To help keep you and others safe

We share and receive information about you with/across Match Group companies to aid us in our efforts to keep you safe. This enables us to do things like:

• Investigate, identify and take action against (e.g., ban) fake accounts, spam, abuse, fraud and other wrongdoings across Match Group services.
• Verify legitimate accounts across Match Group services, for instance by giving your accounts a “verified” status on multiple services, rather than just the one you actively verified on.
• Identify and combat potential discrimination or bias, by improving our ability to check the design and usage of Match Group services against discriminatory or biased outcomes.
• Work with law enforcement when we suspect things such as fraud or harmful or illegal activity, or to help prevent death or imminent bodily harm.

To provide features across Match Group

Depending on the service you use and the country you’re in, we might offer some features involving other Match Group Brands. For instance, in order to improve your chances at building significant connections with others, we may show your profile on other Match Group services or allow you to benefit from other cross-platform functionalities.  We will of course comply with applicable law and, where relevant, notify you of any such opportunity and allow you to agree or to refuse.

To personalize your experience on Match Group services (only applies to users of OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, Stir, BLK, Upward and Chispa, located in the USA, excluding Utah, California, Colorado, Connecticut and Virginia)

If you’re using more than one Match Group service, sharing your information with other Match Group companies allows us to personalize your experience across these services. This personalization includes:

• How your profile is shown to other users and how others’ profiles are shown to you. For instance, this enables us to tailor the profile recommendations you’re getting on OkCupid based on your preferences and matching behavior on another service.
• The prices and discounts you’ll experience on the Match Group services you use. For instance, the prices and discounts you may see for our service may vary, based on the fact that you also use another Match Group service or used a paid feature on that other service.
• What ads you’ll see while using Match Group services. For instance, you might see ads on another Match Group service targeted based on interests you listed on your account with us.

To help promote Match Group’s services (only applies to users of Okcupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, Stir, BLK, Upward, Chispa and The League, located in the USA, excluding Utah, California, Colorado, Connecticut and Virginia)

Like other online providers, Match Group companies run ads promoting their services on third party platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and others. To power this marketing effort and target it at the right audience, companies typically share identifiers of existing members with the third party platforms on which they run ads, to either exclude these members from their marketing campaigns, or to target their ads at them or at an audience that is similar to them in terms of background, interests or app usage. Your identifiers can be used and shared as laid out above to promote OkCupid and other Match Group services. As an example, another Match Group company whose service is highly engaged with by the single parent, the Black or the LGBTQ+ communities may run ads on Facebook to an audience that was created using identifiers of our single parents, Black or LGBTQ+ members.

To understand how people use Match Group services (only applies to users located in the USA)

Sharing information helps us understand how people use Match Group services, for instance by more accurately counting the number of unique registered, active or paid users across Match Group services, how many Match Group services they use on average, how people go from one to the other, and how usage patterns might differ.