On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that Apple and Google removed three dating apps from their stores for allowing kids as young as 12 to access them. The apps in question — Meet24, FastMeet, and Meet4U — are operated by Wildec, a Ukraine-based company. The apps collected users’ birthdates, email addresses, photographs, and real-time location data, the FTC reported. Although each app’s privacy policy claimed to block users who indicated they were under 13, none of the apps actually did so. Instead, young children were able to use the app and be contacted by other people. The FTC did send each of the apps a warning letter, stating that allowing adult users to communicate with children “poses a serious health and safety risk.” In addition, the letter noted that “several individuals have reportedly faced criminal charges for allegedly contacting or attempting to contact minors using Wildec’s apps.” Most alarmingly, the FTC’s letter noted that Wildec seemed to be...

Good afternoon and happy Valentine’s Day! If you’re looking to hop on dating apps to find the love of your life today, you should probably chill for a bit. This morning, Coffee Meets Bagel–a popular dating app–announced a data breach to its users via email. It’s not clear how many accounts were impacted and the company says hackers only gained information from users who were on the app before May 2018. Only users’ names and emails were compromised. Financial information or passwords weren’t hacked since the company doesn’t store those details on its users. In an awkwardly timed announcement, the company didn’t go into extreme detail about the particulars of the breach, but it did lay out a plan to protect its users’ information moving forward and said it will seek the efforts of “forensic security experts” to take a look at the nuts and bolts of the company’s infrastructure. It’s also monitoring for more suspicious activity on the platform. Pro tip: Coffee Meets Bagel should send...