Ireland's Data Protection Commission has fined Match Group €11M because Tinder's "Download My Data" tool did not give users a full copy of the personal data the company holds on them.
Politico reported the decision. The regulator found that the tool left out certain categories of information entirely. Match Group, which owns Tinder, is the company penalized.
The case is about a compliance feature, not a breach or a leak. Europe's data protection law, GDPR (the General Data Protection Regulation), gives people the right to get a copy of the data a company keeps on them. For most users, a self-service export button is the only way they will ever exercise that right. If the export is incomplete, the user has no easy way to notice. You cannot spot a missing category in a file that never mentions it.
That is the reasonable takeaway: regulators are checking whether the tool delivers what it promises, not just whether the button exists.
The amount is modest by the standards of Irish enforcement. The same regulator fined Meta €1.2 billion in 2023 over transfers of European user data to the United States. A fine of €11M signals a narrower offense, but it still lands on a product that millions of people use.
The open question is how many other apps would pass the same audit. Plenty of services offer a download button, and few users have ever compared the file against what the company actually stores.