Pretending to check work email while really swiping through potential dates?
You might want to stop doing that, according to a new report from IBM. Dating apps have access to everything from your GPS location to your phone's camera. Many of them are linked to credit cards. And these days many are on the same phones that have access to business information.
The study looked at around 100 different businesses. It turns out that 50 percent of them had employees who had installed dating apps on their corporate-owned or bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phones.
That is a big problem because 26 of the 41 Android dating apps studied were vulnerable to cyber-attacks. For businesses, it's obviously not great to have employees exposing their phones to hackers, especially when they have access to sensitive business messages.
One of the biggest risks, according to the study, is that users might download malware from a sexy single who just so happens to be a hacker waiting to prey on someone looking for love.
“Consumers need to be careful not to reveal too much personal information on these sites as they look to build a relationship," said Caleb Barlow, vice president of IBM Security, in the study.
That means your boss will be really angry if you click on a link from "HotChic157X" that goes to her "personal website." The study also found that 78 percent of dating apps have access to GPS data and 48 percent of them have access to credit card information.
IBM's advice: don't download apps from places other than official app stores, don't exchange information with or click on links from suspicious-sounding people, and use unique passwords for all your different apps. Companies might want to restrict where employees download apps from and make their security policies clear, the study said.
The alternative is to delete your dating apps and meet someone new in person, which, let's be serious, sounds even worse than getting your phone hacked.